Long post incoming; long story short I've been around the demographics of people who get sucked into this stuff, and I enjoy reading about academic philosophy and enjoy looking at the standards of intellectualism on popular platforms like youtube, so this intersects with my interests enough that I've spent a decent amount of time looking into it. Hopefully someone finds it interesting enough to read, if not, I'll propably have enjoyed crystalizing my thoughts anyway.

I have no beef with Peterson's psychology, like his self-help guides. For all I know, they're perfectly fine. His philosophy however is another story.

Peterson's is a standard story where the media, old or social doesn't care about academics talking about subjects they know about, about expert consensus, nor about popularizers who educate people on those topics responsibly.

Instead, they love these renegade scholars, people rejected by the mainstream, who usually go out of their discipline and start talking about stuff they don't understand. Perhaps some people don't notice it not being familiar with the topics, but once again Peterson isn't famous for his psychology, not at all. It's the commentary about disciplines he doesn't know he spreads surrounding it that catches people's attention.

His ideas about religion are perhaps interesting, but to think that it's a metatruth that is more real than truth, and to use it to go to such certain conclusions? It's hard to believe for me anyone falls for that, and yet they do, perhaps because they like the conclusions. Listen to his podcast on Joe Rogan Experience for his explanation of these "hypertruths", and don't forget to pause and think how these (often) atheist, rationalist fans of his can take this stuff in and not wonder if they've been bamboozled somehow.

His ideas about dominance hierarchies are once again just some basic intuitions about evolution that allow him to get into absurdly certain conclusions, like that feminists are there to destroy the proper meritocratic dominance hierarchies that are there for a reason. Well then, why isn't it the other way around, why after he was rejected by academia didn't he decide that perhaps the oldest meritocratic dominance hierarchy rejected him? You see, there's little reason to go one way or the other, it's just using this vague intuition to support whatever he wants. Much easier to pull this in the space of youtube where nobody even knows any philosophers who would disagree with him; he's can just be another one of those youtubers that make self-encompassing content and rant about debate and dialectic while enjoying fandom which largely doesn't engage with their detractors, and feeding them stuff that wouldn't pass a critical mind.

Next up he is a hardcore pragmatist, listen to the pianful Sam Harris podcast with him on this. For all of his views about horrible truth rejecting postmodernists, he rejects the idea of truth that nearly all of us take in favor of a murky view of truth that allows him to take his conservative positions and go to where he wants with his rants. What a surprise.

Note how most of what he says that is relevant is actually philosophy, even if a lot of it is based on psychology underneath. I would generally celebrate scientists who read philosophy, however you must approach it with humility, not just reference it a bit and go into your baseless rants to justify whatever views you want to have. Furthermore, it is ironic that he bases nearly everything on philosophy, including stuff where scientific data could be of use (like student radicalism, how dangerous is it, how many radicals are there etc - in his thought that is mostly based on philosophy); that is because he has himself criticized other strands of psychologists and scientists for not being scientific enough.

In terms of postmodernism, it has been well covered that he has no idea what is going on, he is yet another bullshit about postmodernism dealer online. Just read wokeupabug's comments in that thread M1zzu recently linked, as well as so many others - it explains how his main source is not at all one you should trust. The forum there is askphilosophy, the user linked has a PhD in philosophy. I wish I could link famous philosophers for this kind of stuff, but they don't like giving these youtube intellectuals and renegade scholars recognition too much. The more I hear of Peterson, the more I wonder if he read anything of postmodernist philosophy, since the only views he seems to espouse perfectly match bullshit dealers like Hicks, and he NEVER EVER seems to properly engage Derrida, Lyotard etc. For all I know, he could be reading neofeudalist conspiracy nuts like Dugin as well. For all of his love of debate and challenge, I would be interested to see him discuss postmodernism with someone who has read the actual books, yet I cannot find that. The worst thing about these people is that there is no way anyone with even the most cursory understanding of postmodernism would mistake Hicks or Peterson as knowledgeable about it; yet it spreads like wildfire. Some of the most dumb misunderstanding of it is perfectly incapsulated in this comic - note the explanation below the comic. The comic itself satirizes the fact that postmodernism is literally the opposite of feminism or marxism, it is as sceptical of metanarratives like them as it is of scientism or judaism. So blaming it for marxism is the dumbest thing you can do. I've personally had this conversation with Peterson's disciples like 50 times; none of them know the first thing about postmodernism and are stumped by these basic questions. This is concerning a school of thought that many of them are sure is trying to bring the downfall of western civilization, mind you - and few if any of them know the most basic things about it.

Cultural marxism is more of the same, it's a repeat of an old nazi conspiracy theory called cultural bolshevism that has to do with a real term... Only the term is about an obscure school of thought that is not even related to any of the claims people make about cultural marxism. It's just another nonsense term to throw around and talk about as much as you want, with no basis. Once again you have to wonder how many of these youtube intellectuals boil down to reading conspriacy theorists to get this stuff. However by now it is a real industry of people repeating the same shit and explaining it as the cause of feminism or transgenderism or whatever they like, with their viewers gobbling it up without any regard for going to the sources which couldn't possibly show anything like it. Makes you wonder how they can doublethink their way into doing that while still considerig themselves intellectuals. Very few people repeating this nonsense even know what critical theory is, yet they're sure as it is bringing the downfall of western civilization. Talk about drinking the kool-aid.

Perhaps the worst is his rejection of academia, although this story is as old and unsurprising as academia itself. I won't go into it too much, just point out that after all he has said on the limited basis he has said it, he also uses to reject like half of academia. Here's a link, onwards for like 3 minutes. Like every other time a person rejects academia, you have to wonder about their standards of evidence. What makes him say what academia gives is worse than what he is teaching, under what standard of evidence, what kind of people accept this, and what makes them do that? The story of anti-intellectualism (and this is cookie-cutter anti-intellectualism at that) is old as time, so I hope it doesn't need repeating. For more ridiculousness, look at his online university project.

From all I've learned about his ideas on law, on C16, they seem to be wrong as well, but this is largely outside this context so I won't go into it other than dropping a link.

Note how all of this connects. Peterson goes outside of his field, talks of things that have nothing to do with his own research. Starts talking philosophy without having any proper expertise of it. Shows no proper capacity to understanding it; simply repeats some basic talking points he got out of secondary sources at best. Gets rejected by all academics I could find that comment on his expertise wrt it. Yet still repeats it and draws conclusions based on it. Adds some metaphorical religion hypertruths, lobster dominance hierarchy memes, completes it with hardcore pragmatism that rejects truth as we know it in favor of what HE considers practical truth. All of these are used to get at his conclusions, which are for the most part just conservative talking points - responsibility, respect your superiors, whatever we have is good don't go around messing with it, hardcore traditionalism, religion, anti-feminism, anti-socialism, the left has gone mad, the left hates debate and free speech, one could go on and on. So he makes a bunch of typical claims for a very traditionalist conservative, that's fine, he's allowed to be rightwing. But once someone makes that many different haphazard, sly, shitty rationales for the same positions, you have to wonder how they were arrived at. Perhaps he just uses whatever philosophy he could find to attack leftwing views and defend christian, conservative, traditionalist views.

Now, I know he has some centre-leftwing positions... But note how they're quite limited, he really doesn't focus on them. The standard 'I guess gay people are okay' stuff. I quite strongly dislike this nonsense where every rightwinger has to be a leftist or ex-leftist in this shitty media landscape we live in. Just own your views, stop trying to deligimaze your opponents in a sly way by pretending to be one of them while really not bein one of them. He's not a prime example of this, but I already suspect that someone will point this out to me so I had to type it out.

Another curious point is how these religious metaphorical metatruths as well as these views on evolutionary pragmatism limit one's certainty of their own views. You could apply the same to his ideas about dominance hierarchies (basically lobsters) and traditionalism as well. Evolutionary pragmatism especially is known within philosophy to give you a very pessimistic view of human knowledge, since humans are only need to understand whatever evolution needed us to understand. Under such views, we should consider ourselves extremely lucky to know as much as we do about science and math, we should forever doubt it. We should certainly be careful about having very clear, bold conclusions about social science, or especially ones about politics and where certain schools of thought will lead. That drives a sharp contrast with Peterson's views about where feminism or socialism would lead, as well as his views on how authoritarianism works that he explains in his lectures (available on his youtube). His views are incredibly ambitious and certain, going from people's honesty with themselves into entire political regimes, going from one honest person to a fall of entire regimes. Sure, these could be interesting metaphors to be explored... But he goes well beyond what I would consider reasonable standards of doubt, arrives at very ambitious conclusions, let alone one's that you'd be supposed to have with this pragmatist, traditionalist, evolutionary-biology informed philosophy. Once again, makes you wonder how he manages to arrive at these ;)

Since I assume that a lof of you might be sceptical of this, go ahead and ask for more sources if you want in terms of something more particular. So there's that. Thanks for reading.

The most radical thing you can do is stepping out of your own field of expertise and daring to have views which are not approved by PHDs, who wasted a lot of money on useless degrees.

Instead of pointing out, that he obviously doesn't know a whole lot about 'marxist' and 'postmodern' thought (which is true) people themselves should try engage him at his epistemological views. And say something about his interpretation of Nietzsche.

It is good, that he refuses the academic speak of 'on the one hand side' 'on the other hand side' and academic anxious relativism in general. He is not afraid to make himself look foolish.

There are a lot of things, that one can say and should say about and against him but appealing to authority is not one of them.
You say, that he isn't well regarded by his peers (ridicilous argument).
And, that there are Phds on the internet in philosophy who don't agree with him and on the basis of this you disregard his views? Sorry but that seems weak as fuck.

marcus aurelius, in the first few pages of his 'meditations', describes a character trait that i believe is very valuable: the ability to look beyond a person's plainspokenness or ignorance in order to understand their intent, rather than to define their faults so as to dismiss their merits. it's easy to criticize others, especially for academics and intellectuals who subscribe to the notion of 'fields of expertise'. it's more difficult to synthesize disparate concepts in good faith with the intention of reaching an understanding, even if you disagree with it. as you say with "on the one hand/other hand" comment, academic types give cursory acknowledgement to contrasting views as an appeasement to the appearance of fairness, rather than as a genuine attempt to understand positions and reach a meaningful conclusion.

what you describe, in my mind, is a more sophisticated form of the 'grammar nazi' problem, wherein a position is disregarded because of some grammatical error committed by the writer. this, to me, is bad-faith argumentation/debate/discussion. the interpreter seeks opportunities to disregard expressions by, as you've stated, appealing to some authority, rather than to develop a good-faith understanding of the opposing position.

the one absurd observation i saw when i glanced briefly at son1dow's original post (after reading your response) was of jordan peterson speaking about philosophy, though peterson has "no proper expertise". what intellectual field isn't philosophical? should we disregard anything valuable contributed to any discussion, just because a person hasn't attained a accredited certified level of knowledge in that particular field? this reasoning allows any critic to regress, ad infinitum, into the appeal to authority, by constantly "moving the goal posts" of what is considered to be "proper expertise", and that's before any subjective interpretations are applied.

any amalgamation of ideas from disparate fields into a general concept is going to do so with some caveats or loss of resolution. that's the nature of synthesis, and just because a person borrows one idea from kant while neglecting another idea or some obscure criticism does not mean that the synthesis doesn't have merit, or can't be used as a springboard from which to develop insightful or entertaining hypothetical discussion or thought.

I'll press reply on your comment although I'm replying to both yours and Klijngsor. I see value in what you're saying, I think absolutely you should think deeply about common people's intent and try to see their meaning even if the words don't make sense. You phrased it fairly well. I personally like the phrasing of 'the principle of humanity' as well.

With that said, there's only so much you can do when you apply that to intellectuals, and Peterson is exactly that. He's a well read academic who knows a shitload about psychology, which is his expertise, and has read tons of philosophy. He's obviously smart as well. If we start talking about academic intent rather than what they say, this gives us a whole host of issues. First of all, how are we to discern who is right, and where we should go in terms of our society? If you look at Peterson's intent and like it, and somebody else like's a feminist's intent and likes it, who is to say which one is right? Don't give me a "obviously never a feminist' answer - many people do agree with them, and so intellectuals will have to deal with them by making actual points. Secondly, it doesn't respect the intellectual's work. He's obviously smart enought to say what he means, and I wouldn't want to go around cherrypicking his psychology work just because I think I know his intent. He would not want me to do that himself.

In terms of philosophy, I think there's a mostly clear distinction about what is philosophy and isn't among academics. It's somewhat arbitrary, as you have to exclude science for the most part arbitrarily, but it is there. Proper expertise isn't a fallacious appeal to authority if there are rational standards for it, it's there for a reason. There is no goalpost moving in saying that... if a very educated academic that is respected within his own field says that postmodernism is causing feminism, it is really terrible, and that is because postmodernism is relativism and that's the same thing as feminism or something like that...then he shows he doesn't have the relevant expertise, he hasn't understood feminism nor postmodernism, and we should instead listen to people who have shown that. And it would be an injustice to the academic to say that he didn't mean this at all, he meant something that we cannot deduce without warping his meaning. The principle of charity (which is sort of the principle of humanity that you can use for academics or people who are intellectually ambitious) doesn't allow you to change the person's meaning.

Philosophy was a thing long before there was academia as we know it today, and philosophers do learn from normal people by looking at their intuitions. I could give you examples of that. I don't think that I'm at fault for requiring Peterson to not literally contradict himself in basic understanding of feminism, marxism and postmodernism.

With that said, there's only so much you can do when you apply that to intellectuals

you reveal so many of your biases in your speech. it would serve you very well to read your own posts as critically as you observe peterson, as you then may see that you are deluded by the very things--such as these 'dominance hierarchies'--that you deride jordan peterson for describing and subscribing to.

regarding philosophy, the 'very clear distinction' you describe is not so clear when scrutinized, or with any cursory research:

'philosophy' is a nebulous term that encompasses all of modern reason, science, literature, entertainment, art, etc. the "western" tradition of philosophy pervades the very structures of our thinking. philosophy is imbued in children in fairy tales and stories. must one be a credentialed authority on fables in order to express opinions about the metaphorical meanings of cinderella, or does that not meet the arbitrarily positioned goalpost you've set for when it's acceptable to grant sincere attention to somebody's expressions?

so, how much of an authority must jordan peterson be so that he may express himself unobtrusively? how will jordan peterson know that he has gained such authority without expressing himself to test the boundaries of his knowledge? should he refrain from speaking his thoughts until those thoughts have been approved for speech by an accreditation service?

the 'principle of charity' doesn't disallow anything. the principle of charity is an abstract concept that a person must practice, and a person recognizing the principle of charity doesn't inherently determine whether or not that person will charitably interpret a position. a big problem with academics and intellectuals and smart people in general is that they are aware of concepts such as the 'principle of charity', and by being aware of those concepts they become confident in their own charitability. that confidence blinds them and they remain ignorant to their uncharitable behaviors. you're familiar with what people refer to as the dunning-kruger effect? this can been seen very commonly in academic and intellectual settings, where the confidence of accreditation and academic achievement help to mask the commonality of all-too-human behaviors.

i don't think you're at fault for requiring peterson to not literally contradict himself in basic understanding of feminism, marxism, and postmodernism. i think you're just not very charitable in your interpretation of his positions.

to address another random sentence that caught my attention of your original post:

The more I hear of Peterson, the more I wonder if he read anything of postmodernist philosophy, since the only views he seems to espouse perfectly match bullshit dealers like Hicks, and he NEVER EVER seems to properly engage Derrida, Lyotard etc.

this statement appears to be citing the reddit thread you linked, referencing m1zzu. i want to point out that there is not a single post in that reddit thread that actually cites anything jordan peterson has said (though i admit i skimmed all the responses). funnily enough, one of the responses i read was:

Post-modernism is a large scale intellectual, cultural, and artistic movement. It is deeply complex, and the boundaries are not well defined. There are clear "post-modern" scholarly works, however, and there is much to learn from them.

which aptly demonstrates one of the sources for the problem of nebulously defined ideologies that allows people to 'move the goal posts' in order to evade criticism.

also, the irony of you citing a reddit philosophy thread to support your disdain for peterson as a philosopher is funny.

A lot of what you say about my tone and is fair. I think I could argue some relevant circumstances, like this being ESR... I think every time you take leftwing positions or talk philosophy people will look to make you out as pretentious or arrogant, that's just a thing. I also think it's somewhat fair to expect some of the things I expected from others - like accepting a lower standard of rigor for criticizing feminism - because that seems to have happened already in this very thread. With that said, there's no reason to pretend you shouldn't be above it. I wrote this somewhat hastily, late at night, and while I do stand by the points I do see something lacking in terms of tone here and there, and would write it a little bit more considerately if I was to rewrite it.

There's also definitely some stuff I would clarify, as I accept that it isn't immediately obvious for some what I mean. For instance, with philosophy, I do mean academic philosophy, not personal philosophy or philosophy including science art and literature. I'm sure it pervades everything, and everybody is welcome to talk it, or pay attention to whom they like. In fact, I'd even go as far as to say that you cannot live without doing philosophy; I am definitely on board with that.

Postmodernism is complicated as well, I agree. Particularly as it differs from one discipline to another. But I'm talking about it within philosophy. As even the quote you give says, there are clear 'post-modern' scholarly works, particularly in philosophy, who are quite clearly philosophy. They might not be all in perfect agreement but there are general trends and ideas within them.

And the thing is, while anyone can pay attention to anyone they want, but if you're an academic and if we're to take you seriously when you're commenting on another field, you have to be careful and show your understanding of the topic. Peterson has gone the completely the other way with that, and I do not think I am being uncharitable here. That's the bar, not some approval by some board or whatever. Nobody is saying that.

I get your point regarding Dunning-Kruger and principle of charity. For a long while I would name myself 'kruger reviews my replays" or something like that in games. Being aware of these, of course, doesn't show that you considered them correctly. I'd actually argue that academics who comment outside of their own fields tend to be exactly the ones who fall prey to this rather than others. With that said, we need to discuss the particulars.

I could cite more glamorous sources, but really, a lot of the people on r/askphilosophy are very qualified, wokeupabug, in particular, is quite amazing. When they don't cite Peterson, that doesn't make their criticism worse. Sure, they're not writing essays exposing him for the most part, however, showing how Hicks' book isn't a good source about postmodernism - while Peterson is advertising it all over the place and seemingly just repeating what it says - is very good criticism of Peterson. It's not irrelevant in the slightest, it strikes at both what Peterson says and the intellectual foundation under which he is saying it.

also, Peterson discusses guys like Derrida on his podcasts. so your statement that he 'never ever' does is false. it's interesting to note that cognitive therapy commonly informs people who use extreme language such as 'never', 'always', etc. to practice mindfulness when they express things in this way. it's common for such expressions to be an indication of ignorance about a subject. i say this in good faith to you, not as an insult.

Oh, I think I remember this point from a Mixed Mental Arts podcast, they admonished the new atheists with this. It's a fair point, although it does get a bit hard with Peterson and other people bashing postmodernism and cultural Marxism at times. These are such scapegoats that I struggle to keep composure when I meet them again and again.

Let me ask you something though. What makes it okay to say that postmodernism is relativistic when it isn't? What makes it okay to say postmodernism is against rationality when the postmodern philosophers talked at length about trying to make the world more rational? What makes it okay to say that it agrees with feminism or Marxism when it's criticizing all metanarratives? What makes it okay to demonize it for ruining our culture when it's a somewhat small school of philosophy that is neither nihilistic nor is the cause for whatever amounts of modern nihilism there are in the popular culture? What makes it okay to say that feminism or Marxism is relativistic, when these are modernist philosophies which in seemingly all aspects are the opposite of that - they give a unifying narrative to the world.

How much more charity could we apply here? The grasp of postmodernism as a broad, complicated movement is completely lost with this kind of thinking. This isn't about credentials, these are mistakes that would discredit anyone talking about these topics.

It doesn't even get to a point where Peterson is wrong or right about criticism, he just doesn't seem to criticize the right thing.

WRT him talking about Derrida, I will go check that out. I've watched dozens of hours of Peterson's interviews and lectures, and discussed him a lot, but I haven't heard him actually engage Derrida, so I definitely want to hear that.

Edit: About dominance hierarchies. They are fine. Obviously they are great when they are meritocratic. What i am criticizing is the metaphorical, basic reference to dominance hierarchies as an argument against someone criticizing specific dominance hierarchies. It's just wholly unspecific and unrigorous, and it could go the other way just as well.

so from your response, i think the majority of your 'issue' with peterson comes from a reluctance to compartmentalize his non-academic work (ie interviews and popular media type discussions) from his academic work, and your rigorous desire to hold academics like peterson to what i consider unfair standards so that they cannot discuss these issues casually or in non-academic standards, though i do admit that it's fair to criticize him and others if you believe he's intentionally misrepresenting things using his knowledge.

I've loved plenty of people presenting serious issues in a casual way; they didn't, to my knowledge at least, say things that are contradictory to any good interpretation of the issue. There's a lot of light communication you can do without falling prey to saying those things that I asked you about. They are completely incorrect and obviously not borne out of a serious look at the issue. I don't see how more serious work in the background would excuse such nonsense. At the same time, I don't see what serious work Peterson has done about the issue, I've listened to him tons, including his lectures, and he just seems to repeat the same terrible interpretations of these things. The academic popularizers I like meanwhile usually have produced or pointed to serious content that easily links up and makes sense after reading their popularizing content. I could give examples, if you want.

Perhaps you could comment on the last part in italic and argue on why you clearly don't see the mistakes as that egregious, but seemingly as the natural result most would produce when talking about these topics to a popular audience?

i haven't said anything about whether any mistakes, whether there are any are any at all, are egregious or otherwise, and i haven't said anything about these imaginary mistakes you're referring to are the natural result most would produce when talking about these topics to a popular audience. i will happily comment on the last part in italics, though not under the burden of your baseless assumptions.

as to the last part in italic, are you referring to this?

Let me ask you something though. What makes it okay to say that postmodernism is relativistic when it isn't? What makes it okay to say postmodernism is against rationality when the postmodern philosophers talked at length about trying to make the world more rational? What makes it okay to say that it agrees with feminism or Marxism when it's criticizing all metanarratives? What makes it okay to demonize it for ruining our culture when it's a somewhat small school of philosophy that is neither nihilistic nor is the cause for whatever amounts of modern nihilism there are in the popular culture? What makes it okay to say that feminism or Marxism is relativistic, when these are modernist philosophies which in seemingly all aspects are the opposite of that - they give a unifying narrative to the world.

How much more charity could we apply here? The grasp of postmodernism as a broad, complicated movement is completely lost with this kind of thinking. This isn't about credentials, these are mistakes that would discredit anyone talking about these topics.

It doesn't even get to a point where Peterson is wrong or right about criticism, he just doesn't seem to criticize the right thing.

if so, i'll respond first with a question: what makes it okay to do anything at all? a pragmatic person like peterson might respond that the act itself is its own justification, in that it is permissible by circumstantial reality, and therefore has been realized. what do you think?

i don't know what else to say in response to this. what does "it doesn't even get to a point where peterson is wrong or right about criticism, he just doesn't seem to criticize the right thing" even mean? what right thing should he be criticizing? what is the wrong thing is he criticizing wrongly? your posts, and the reddit thread you linked, criticize peterson in the same way you accuse peterson of criticizing whateverisms. you stated that you haven't listened to his podcasts, even after you claimed he 'never, ever' addresses derrida. does this discredit you? have you been accredited by an academy for your studies of petersonism? what makes it okay for you to say peterson 'never, ever' addresses derrida when he does? how many other 'egregious' mistakes are you making? you are already self-professedly ignorant to peterson's academic and media works.

i really don't care about the answer to those questions. they are rhetorical devices to assist in demonstrating that you are doing the very same things that you accuse peterson of doing (whether he is or not), except you are giving yourself charitability and good-faith, for whatever reason. how is it that you can allow yourself the freedom to speak and make mistakes and still accept and expect the gracious charitability of your readers, and yet not see that your own behaviors can be analyzed to determine 'how it is okay' that somebody can make some claims?

tangential to this response, i recommend for you to contact peterson directly to engage him in a discussion about your concerns. i'm not an expert on peterson. i've listened to his podcast, i've read a bit of maps and meaning, and i've listened to a few of his appearances on the joe rogan show. i think he's a very intelligent and well-spoken person, and that even in conflict he shows careful restraint and thoughtfulness in how he speaks. these are qualities that, to me, show intent and a will to good-faith communication. i'm also ignorant to whateverisms. the point of saying all of this is that i can't directly verify your claims about whether or not peterson is so 'egregiously' mistaken, and i don't see any instances where you've done so. this is why i haven't commented about whether or not he is mistaken, but have focused more on other issues, such as supplementing things other people have said with my own observations, and questioning the quality of your position and analyzing your behaviors as demonstrated in this thread.

your posts, and the reddit thread you linked, criticize peterson in the same way you accuse peterson of criticizing whateverisms. you stated that you haven't listened to his podcasts, even after you claimed he 'never, ever' addresses derrida. does this discredit you? have you been accredited by an academy for your studies of petersonism? what makes it okay for you to say peterson 'never, ever' addresses derrida when he does? how many other 'egregious' mistakes are you making?[q]

It's a mistake of style, as far as I can tell? I said "since the only views he seems to espouse perfectly match bullshit dealers like Hicks, and he NEVER EVER seems to properly engage Derrida, Lyotard etc.". The NEVER EVER being in bold is a bit extreme, and fits in awkwardly with the "seems" that after it. The seems sort of gives enough epistemic humility to accurately match my view, however it just reads weird when following "NEVER EVER" in bold. If the sentence is confusing, then fair enough, I take responsibility for that.

With that said, I stand by the meaning that he doesn't seem properly engage them. I don't consider Hicks' to be proper engagement, and he has all but repeated it, or said it in even dumber terms. I will absolutely listen to the podcast just because I'm curious, but it won't be to confirm that he does a 180, denies all of what he said about Postmodernism and chastises Hicks - that's what it would take, and I consider that less likely than him losing his sanity.

By the time he released the podcast I had already listened to dozens and dozens of his lectures / long-form interviews and other content. The podcast seemed to malfunction on my phone, I don't know why, but when I could download, with some struggle, I found it to be more of the same, with a heavier focus on "get a job and clean your room". So if you mean something general in terms of my self-professed ignorance of his works, I disagree.

Suppose I did say that he never talks about Derrida. With the speed I was typing, and considering that I'm just typing out things I've learned before, not thinking through everything and rereading them for six times, it could happen. Or did some other similar mistake. Seeing as we're on ESR, I would probably expect that the reaction to that would be different based on how reliable a person wants their ESR readings to be. Most are probably okay with some of that depending on how much accuracy they're willing to sacrifice for discussion among their online peers, etc. I personally think we should react quite differently to the same mistake in an article, or content prepared to be consumed for thousands of people, like a youtube video or a lecture. There, such a mistake should test the confidence in what the author says and make the listener reconsider if the content is worthy of his time. Depends on what the listener feels like spending his time on, but similarly to football transfer talk or TMZ or "OMG this SJW on tumblr is an idiot" type of content, a smarter listener will probably keep how serious the content is in mind.

I don't expect you to be an expert in any -ism, but in most of these cases I don't see why it's needed. I don't see why you praise Peterson for his composure when he engages in such hasty generalizing and silly psychologizing(?) of the other side (even for an expert of psychology, it's still a very lazy way of engaging the other side that many could do). I don't see what's not evident about his lobster, religious, and pragmatist nonsense being hypocritical and dishonest considering his critique of relativism. I don't see why you would need to be an expert in postmodernism when you can read the SEP article on it, read the criticism of Hicks I linked and see that Peterson simply isn't doing it service from authoritative sources.

With that said, that's your business. I see your praise of him as a decent indication of you not agreeing with the fact that he makes the mistakes I said he does, or that they're mistakes, and that's why I'm surprised to see you not just say that I'm wrong about them and possibly argue why. If you don't like thinking about that and prefer having your fun watching Peterson destroy silly SJWs and you're only here to criticize bits and pieces of my rhetoric, that's fine.

Funny bit, that one about sending him criticism. Hoping you mean just as a way of 'don't say this to me', because a professor who bashes other schools of thought and even fields of study without properly engaging them isn't going to pay attention to someone online telling him he's wrong. Especially as he's busy telling half the academia off and building his university that won't have any of this nonsense.

you devoted a paragraph of your post to justifying your right to make mistakes and be incorrect in informal settings, and yet you still haven't made the connection between your previous reference to the "principle of charity" and your disproportionate application of such a principle to yourself vs. peterson. can you conceive of a reality in which you spend an equal amount of time (maybe 1-2 minutes?) charitably granting peterson some leeway in his informal expressions?

I don't see why you praise Peterson for his composure

i didn't "praise" peterson for his composure. in the same thread that you decry jordan peterson for speaking out of turn about subjects he isn't an expert in, you express confusion about why i won't argue about a topic i'm admittedly ignorant about.

I see your praise of him as a decent indication of you not agreeing with the fact that he makes the mistakes I said he does, or that they're mistakes, and that's why I'm surprised to see you not just say that I'm wrong about them and possibly argue why.

i haven't praised jordan peterson. your confusion is based on a false premise. i haven't said that he does or does not make mistakes, and refraining from agreeing with you does not mean that i disagree with you. i'm agnostic to your position about him making mistakes, and whether or not jordan peterson makes the mistakes you claim is totally irrelevant to my observations and points.

Hoping you mean just as a way of 'don't say this to me', because a professor who bashes other schools of thought and even fields of study without properly engaging them isn't going to pay attention to someone online telling him he's wrong. Especially as he's busy telling half the academia off and building his university that won't have any of this nonsense.

i don't mean just as a way of "don't say this to me". i genuinely recommend that you communicate with peterson. you can continue "spinning your wheels" on the subject, and citing "reddit philosophers" (and appealing to their authority), and presumptuously assuming the motivations of others who aren't satisfied by your claims as given. i know that there are people for whom this activity is enjoyable. if you really want answers, there is one legitimate way to get them: contact jordan peterson.

of course, and this is only my opinion, the mindset of a "loser" would be to preemptively declare that communicating with such a busy celebrity is a lost cause.

also, it's funny to me that your position would be to tell him that he's wrong, rather than to charitably engage him in a good-faith discourse. i guess it's difficult for people with ideological agendas to detach themselves for the sake of good understanding. according to your language, it seems that you are not open-minded about this subject, and so this entire thread may be a result of some intellectual masturbatory vanity of self-affirmation.

I hope you didn't miss the part of my comment styled as part of a quote, as I failed to exclude it.

As I said, I think it's a mistake of style, at least seems to me that way. So I don't see myself as needing that charity directly, however even if I did, I wasn't really defending myself. My defense of mistakes was just along the lines of "it's your choice what sort of quality you demand from your reading in different contexts". I personally see them as entirely different on forums and content produced for large audiences. I think it gives you bad habits to not have high standards for content that is popular, like Peterson's is. It creates a bad media landscape, and limits your understanding as you have even less time to read proper sources.

I have no delusions that I've written very carefully, although I've followed the issue for a long time and have fairly strong opinions in terms of the main claims. Producing a text that fairly translates them to other people, that's more difficult.

In my view he is making really bad mistakes in contexts which should not excuse such mistakes. I don't see how a lot of what he says could be defended even if it was in a 5 minute video, let alone in the 3 hour long interviews or his own videos and even his lectures.

I disagree on what you've said/implied about liking or disliking him, praising him, and partially about whether he makes mistakes and how bad they are, especially if you allow to read between the lines; but I suppose we already had a long discussion about the implications your comments about him made, right? I wasn't able to convince then you even though I saw the case as very clear there. It's a bit of a goose chase, especially as it pertains to convincing you even more so than just showing it to a neutral observer.

I still hold that you do not need to be an expert to verify the claims I've made, certainly the majority of them, but whatever man.

Note that the reddit philosophers I've cited were also in some cases citing real philosophers, and I cited other things too. Nobody in this thread has given more authoritative sources on the ideologies Peterson scapegoats than I, but I suppose "reddit philosopher authority" has too nice of a ring to it to pass up. I expect your claim about the motivations was about yourself? It'd be nice if you dived in a little more if you were going to talk about not being satisfied.

Regarding contacting Peterson, (a) I've seen people much more qualified than me contact him, and how that went; (b) I've seen how the media game generally works (including wrt people who aren't offering platforms or legitimacy as seen by the media); (c) I've seen Peterson explain his terrible, worse than surface-level readings of many things he talks about (d) and I've seen him react to what people say. If he's willing to go against all evidence to say the things he does, clearly his powers of psychologizing and projecting will not allow him to accept that point from a lowly hobby reader. They've prevented him from doing much more pertinent things. Besides, how would it even give me much of value to hear his responses? He's not going to explain his thoughts better than he's explained it in the dozens upon dozens of hours of his content that I've watched.

That last bit of yours is even more vitriolic than what you've said before. I don't see how I can even continue to take your claims seriously as you just psychologize me based on choice of words which may or may not indicate what you say, but ultimately are much, much less indicative of anything than the actual claims I've made about his mistakes. I see psychologizing as only really excusable if you're looking for very weak indications or you're very convinced of the evidence for abductive reasoning. The word "wrong" there isn't even meant to say that this would be my focus, it's simply what necessarily pops out when our positions are that far away, so yes, I would expect him to think about that almost no matter how I frame it. It might be sly to even attempt to cover it up with a bunch of fancy rhetoric, needlessly and ostentatiously celebrating rationality and free speech like many do which I dislike. Either way, your claims become increasingly wilder and wilder if we're to assume that you're agnostic about whether my critiques of him are successful and have digested how their conclusions change the perception of Peterson's openmindedness.

Do you do this often, this sort of psychologizing people while being (or claiming to be...) agnostic about their points? Reading this much into their choice of words without giving much relevance to how the claims themselves fare?

again, i'm not addressing any of what you claim are jordan peterson's "mistakes". i haven't addressed those claims, and i won't. i still haven't read the original post of this thread. i'm not interested.

just because a "reddit philosopher" cites another philosopher doesn't mean that the "reddit philosopher" is correct, or that the "reddit philosopher" is making an appropriate citation in good faith. the "authority" of citation isn't unimpeachable.

i want to be clear: you are deriding jordan peterson for not being an expert while speaking about philosophical subjects, and then claiming that i do not need to be an expert to verify information pertaining to those same philosophical subjects that you're deriding jordan peterson for speaking about. once i've "verified" the information that you approve of, am i then more qualified than jordan peterson to speak about it? how do i go about verifying your expertise on the subject? how do i know that your level of expertise is enough to determine that the level of expertise i would attain by reading your suggested materials would make me an expert? is it just a coincidence that by reading what you recommend i would attain your approval for speaking about the subject?

nothing i said was vitriolic, and i haven't "psychologized" you. it is my opinion that the mindset of a "loser" is to presuppose failure in order to refrain from action. if you interpret that as vitriolic, then that is vitriol emerging from within yourself. if you take some personal offense to that, then maybe it's close to the mark? i won't pretend to know.

it is also my opinion that you've posted this thread as a way to reinforce your own preconceived notions, and that your "loserish" reticence to contact jordan peterson, with all of your assumptive justifications (i've seen how he responds to others like me, so it's a lost cause! he's busy, so it's a lost cause!) inform my opinions. this has nothing to do with "psychologizing", and everything to do with observing your behaviors and finding patterns and trends, which is a perfectly natural behavior for any human being. i just happen to have spotted yours and i guess that's making you uncomfortable enough to start trying to demonize me as vitriolic and as a "psychologizer".

by saying The word "wrong" there isn't even meant to say that this would be my focus, it's simply what necessarily pops out when our positions are that far away, so yes, I would expect him to think about that almost no matter how I frame it you're justifying your flippant dismissal of his position after you've revealed your rigid position. you aren't approaching these disagreements in good-faith. you're approaching these disagreements like some handler-on-high who is suffering the incorrect positions of others in order to show them their errors. you use the pretense of polite discourse (ie thanking people for responses) to manipulate a perception of you as friendly and open to discussion, when your intent is really to show others how they're wrong, and the funny thing about it is that you do all this proselytizing while not realizing that you're behaving the same way as jordan peterson, and that anybody could criticize you the same way if they cared to (which they don't, because compared to jordan peterson you're a rather inconsequential figure, and so not worth the effort of asking "reddit philosophers" for their opinions about you).

Either way, your claims become increasingly wilder and wilder if we're to assume that you're agnostic about whether my critiques of him are successful and have digested how their conclusions change the perception of Peterson's openmindedness.

i'm 100% agnostic about your critiques of jordan peterson. i don't know anything about the whateverisms you're talking about, nor do i know anything about how jordan peterson talks about those whateverisms. i haven't addressed those whateverisms or said you're this way or that way regarding those whateverisms. i don't care about peterson's openmindedness. i responded originally in this thread to somebody else's post, and my original response only briefly addressed one sentence that i glanced at from your original post (and that one sentence had nothing to do with whateverisms or your "critiques" of peterson's understanding of them).

Well, with your admitted ignorance of my post, these questions become nothing more than what a 12 year old would ask his mom about academic consensus, or how we know what it is with partial information. The daring to message him isn't any more mature considering your "agnosticism towards his openmindedness". A winner doesn't care for that in initiating a conversation, does he ;)

I'm consistently impressed by how much you can say while being agnostic towards my actual points that would explain my motivations far more than your psychologizing (indeed, that term, which absolutely applies once again) does. Just deciding to show up and type up the comments you do while remaining this kind of an agnostic really says it all. Enjoy pulling this shit on others, I guess.

once again, i responded to somebody else in this thread, and then you responded to me, and so now i'm responding to you. i'm not interested in your issues with whateverisms or jordan peterson's positions about those whateverisms.

i don't know what you mean when you say "nothing more than what a 12 year old would ask his mom about academic consensus, or how we know what it is with partial information" or how that applies to anything i've said. i haven't dared you to message him, i've recommended that you do so, because that would give you direct access to discuss your thoughts with him. i haven't said anything about being "agnostic towards his openmindedness". i don't know what you mean by saying "a winner doesn't care for that in initiating a conversation".

are you really impressed, or are you just posturing? if you are impressed, then you're easily impressed. this sort of discussion comes pretty easily to me, and i enjoy it. i'm not "agnostic toward your actual points that would explain [your] motivations far more than [my] psychologizing", i'm agnostic toward your positions about jordan peterson's position on whateverisms, and toward your claims about those whateverisms. i'm intentionally agnostic, because i'm ignorant about those subjects, and i'll continue to be agnostic because i don't care to become informed about those subjects. just because you say the term "psychologizing" applies does not mean that it does.

i didn't "just decide to show up and type up the comments [i] do while remaining this kind of an agnostic". i responded to somebody who isn't you in this thread, and then you started engaging me in arguments about jordan peterson's positions on whateverisms and trying to convince me that jordan peterson is wrong, and i've worked diligently to refrain from commenting about those things i've claimed to be ignorant about so that i don't "speak out of turn" about things i don't know about. i've been very clear and patient throughout this discussion.

i don't care about what jordan peterson says about whateverisms, i'm totally ignorant to those things, and i'm ignorant to the whateverisms themselves. my interest in this conversation isn't those things, it's other things, which i've discussed clearly. you've conflated my participation in this thread with some desire to argue with you about whateverisms and jordan peterson's positions on them. if you'd step back a bit maybe you would understand this, and stop reading all i write from behind the veil of delusion about my intents.

if you need to pretend that i'm "pulling this shit" on you in order to escape from the conversation, then that's fine, but i urge you to reread our discussion with an open mind. maybe you'll see how off-target you've been.

also, i was kind of curious about how much effort it would take to find sources for jordan peterson's direct comments about derrida, etc., due to your claim that peterson has "never, ever" addressed guys like derrida, so i searched on google for "jordan peterson on derrida", and it came up with lots of results:

it doesn't seem charitable, at least to me, that you would cite sources such as "reddit philosophers" to support your claim that peterson is wrong, and then claim that peterson "never, ever" addresses people like derrida, when it is so easy to discover otherwise. maybe this could help you in your peterson quest. i didn't watch any of the videos or read any of it, so i'm still 100% ignorant, but i hope this will further inform your perspectives.

also, peterson discusses guys like derrida on his podcasts. so your statement that he 'never ever' does is false. it's interesting to note that cognitive therapy commonly informs people who use extreme language such as 'never', 'always', etc. to practice mindfulness when they express things in this way. it's common for such expressions to be an indication of ignorance about a subject. i say this in good faith to you, not as an insult.

one other thing i'd like to respond to is this:

Don't give me a "obviously never a feminist' answer

this sort of expression may please your contemporaries, who may agree with your positions and see the people you disagree with as predictable or trite, but to the people you're speaking to in disagreement it has a different impact. to my perception it becomes condescending, because you are assuming some trite position that you expect me to take, and then dismissing it without regard or respect.

some people might describe it as smug pretense. to those people i would say to relax and practice some charitable principles. i'm sure you're not all bad!

Read my reply to Anonymous above, it's a reply to parts of your post as well.

I'm not sure we can agree, as it seems you just value academia a whole lot less than me and that isn't a gap you cover in one conversation. I'll just say that I don't think he's different from academia though, he's exactly part of it in most respects, he's just bad in some of them. Appealing to authority isn't strictly a fallacy, it can be but it can be a relevant argument if we agree the authority to be relevant.

That's fine if you don't, only... I think Peterson disagrees with you a lot too. He does think he understands postmodernism, he is absolutely sure of it, and he is sure he understands it exactly, not in a layman manner. So I wonder if like him yourself, then. I don't think he'd apply the charity (which you apply to him) to feminists, and I suspect you'd agree with that.

I already did provide some arguments that do not appeal to authority too. Note that while I couldn't just argue all of his points when providing an overview, I absolutely can provide arguments for specific bits, if you want :)

Edit: One more thing. I could give you some thoughts philosophers have about his interpretation of Nietzsche, or his pragmatism, or other stuff. They tend to be quite negative though, and I'm still not quite if you care about them or not :?

I personally just don't see a whole lot of merit in the way this discussion is going, because a lot of the discussion here seems to be around questions along the lines of "is his hype justified?" and "how can we make sure that he is revered by his academic peers?", "does he adhere to academic contemporary standards?" , "can he really state this in that way or should he formulate his position differently?".

Here is the thing, he doesn't engage in a limited debate about a well defined question in the philosophical institute, a discussion with peers on an academical level, where he would have to adhere to academic standards and charitability and so on.
He engages on a meta-level, like some european intellectuals would have done it. He tries to see the big picture.
Students would indeed be ill advised, when writing a paper, to write it like JBP speaks or argue how he argues.

Ok, so you seem to take issue with his arguing in favor of the notion, that there is an academic current of postmodern thought, which is to a large extend similar to marxist thought and is right now the predominant current in the humanities in the anglo-saxon academic sphere.

So his claims are:
1 There is a thing called postmodernism.
2 There is a thing called cultural marxism.
3 Both are to a large degree similar.
4 They share the same core assumptions on which further thinking in that tradition of thought is based.
5 They are now predominant in most institutes in most universities in the humanities in the form, that more than 50% of teaching personal would agree with the core assumptions mentioned in 4.
6 They are actively trying to bully people out of academia who don't agree with those core values.
7 The core concepts of this thinking leads to a bad state of mind within the individual and to an overall worse state of the society as a whole.

I think it's a fair assessment of one of his claims, that he is actively trying to raise attention in the public about.

I think your criticism is mostly and from many people, that one is unable to make statement 1 and 2, 3 but you can't make that claim that 1 and 2 and 3 are wrong until you have actually looked at his argumentation in 4.

If you look at how he arrives at his conclusions I think it is evident, that he uses a very individualistic mode of thinking. He thinks from the individual upwards, he thinks from the position of the individual, which is due to his work as a clinical Psychologist and his lecture of Nietzsche.

On the level of 4 we are at a very abstract level, and so he doesn't necesserily have to read or understand a lot of postmodern classics, he can just look at academia and how proponents of the left current of thought are behaving.
He sees the left academia and the claims they make, he sees the classics that they read in their courses and then he states that the classics they read are bad because they must be saying the wrong things if they lead to a generation of academics making claims that he disgrees with.
Given: there is a fallacy here ofc., because he didn't prove, that this specific policy (let's take this bill as an example C16 or whatever) is a result of reading too much Foucault.
But that is due to his thinking as a PSychologist who works with quantitative instruments: They are looking for correlation in variables to explain a behavior f.e. The real explanation, the why, is made up after you found a correlation between the variables.
So he doesn't really need to show how that boils down to at an individual level of the actual proponent of postmodern thought.

[[In your thread that you linked. (didn't read but scrolled through) I came across the close reading of one of his speeches. Close reading is what many people do when they argue in the internet it is also a technique in cultural studies, where you take every sentence and every word and scrutinize it. This is missing the point because you miss the bigger picture and may very well be one of the reasons for the people, being against him, to be picky and easily be offended by words, which they see as words without taking the greater context and meaning into account.]]

What it boils down to: It is a very old and a very legitimate claim that he makes, and the way in which he makes it is also legitimate; the claim is this: there is a human nature. If your're postmodern or not and depending on how postmodern you are you might say: but how can we really be able to see human nature even if it would exist, or you say like Judith Butler that there is no human nature, and that everything is a social construct (to brake postmodern thought down like that is fucking legitimate, as it is legitimate to claim that marxist thought postulates the equality of races and individuals); because those are postulates on which all the other thought is derived from.

So I really don't understand your scrutinizing, if he should be able to make the claims that he makes.

In all things human, cultural and philosphic, you should embrace the standpoint that everything is personal and a question of perspective . I'm not saying that there are no facts, there are, however the facts are irrelevant, since it is how you interpret them that counts. You seem to be afraid, that you are being misinformed
and seem to put a lot of emphasis on academic standards and formal education. I think that is untrue in the sense that (and this is a very conservative pessimistic view, maybe that's why JBP reasonnates with me) there are no ropes and you can never be certain and there are no real guidelines and you cannot be misguided.

Academic education in itself is ideological, there are a lot of works which go about how paradigms shift and how there definitively is an academic group think.

So whatever someone states, it says more about them than the actual phenomenon at hand.

I thought a fair bit about how to engage you on this so we can understand each other and not miss your point. Let me try and make a case for why this sort of debate that Peterson is engaging in is unhelpful even if it can seem useful, insightful and interesting.

So, first of all, I can see where you're coming from. When I first saw Peterson, I liked him. I think his view of viewing religion is interesting. I think his Jungian focus is interesting. I think he was/is sincere, although he's stretching my limits with that nowadays. I think the psychology of an individual is an interesting aspect of politics, and I don't begrudge people like Jung who go to discover what the people are like in the east to consider how the west could be out of shape, and try to think about what that says about our political systems. I don't hate pragmatism either.

With that said, there are limits to how confident you can be about these sort of points, I would say. I slowly changed my mind about him after seeing him be waaaay too confident with the conclusions he gets from his metaphorical, religious, pragmatist reasoning. They can be tools to guide you and point to where you need to look. However, it is really easy to just get lost in them and use them as simplistic explanations of everything. As a way to see that, you should consider how easy it is to make such points for everyone. So while I think that they can be interesting and insightful, I think that you have to significantly limit your conclusions from such metaphorical, psychological methods of analysis, especially when it comes to talking to people on the other side, because you're under threat of becoming the very thing Peteson claims to hate, a nihilist/relativist (he seems to use these interchangeably even though you probably shouldn't) who just does what he can to gain more power for himself.

A way to see that could perhaps be to see if we can make the same level of conclusions about those intellectuals of old. To each of these, you could make points about dominance hierarchies, about how they doubt the things we consider real, how they are playing a game similar to one Peterson accuses the SJW's of. From a birds eye view that Peterson is criticizing Postmodernism of, they might as well all be nihilists. Because you can frame all critics in this way, even though criticism is a way of discerning truth.

Plato thinks that his "forms" are more true than the outside world we live in. Descartes digs a hole he can't get out of (without understanding that himself), making us dreadfully aware of how little we can be sure of. Hume does something similar while not giving us the sort hope of rationalism that Descartes offers, suggesting we just deal with it as a reality on the limits of what we know intellectually. Kant, in trying to reconcile the two, ends up just denying the common understanding of how we know the things we know. There is plenty of dirt to be found if you're just looking to find what seems like a denial of reality and our sense for "the real world". It really doesn't hold up if you read what they're looking to achieve with their thinking, how they themselves accept that as skeptics, they only that intellectually, and only to get at truth, build a better base for it. But the interpretation is there if you want to find it and don't care for the details.

In terms of more recent thinkers, you could also throw Nozick under the bus, he's saying that unless we have a perfect theoretical clean slate, we can't have justice in a society with limited government. Right-libertarians will not be happy with that, for all that his writing has given to them. You could throw Popper under the bus, who in trying to differentiate science from astrology made a theory of science that... Doesn't exactly give us the most comforting conclusions, especially if we consider what some think is its incompatibility with statistical evidence, including much of our most appreciated science, like QM. He would also just gladly chuck Jung and Freud out of the science realm. There's plenty of ways to paint them as deniers of truth if you want.

Peterson's criticism of "be grateful", "appreciate what you have", "look what the west has done for you" could easily be applied to the rights activists that won black folks equality in the US, and similar civil liberties around the world. Indeed, it has been.

Now, think about this from the Feminists / Marxist's perspective. They give an argument about the validity of gender that involves statistics and categories, they're called a nihilist. They give an argument against systematic racism, they get told their papers and books mean nothing, they should read the dictionary definition of racism and that they should just be more appreciative. They give an argument about the damage income inequality does, they get a lecture about lobsters and painted as only thinking this because supposedly they just want to destroy the dominance hierarchy (=western culture) that meritocratically placed them low. They make an argument against racial realism, involving no postmodernism, they get called a postmodernist. Even if they dislike postmodernism! They make an argument for the difference of gender and sex only referencing the psychology manual, they get called a cultural Marxist and a postmodernist who will bring the downfall of western civilization. This isn't about if they're right or not, this is about if they're getting argued against well.

I'm not saying Peterson gave these exact answers to these specific arguments, even though he certainly came close or said similar things, but the point is that he doesn't have good answers to these. It's not what you learn form him, from him you learn high-level psychologising. And that's not what you should get from a figure central in this debate, it only polarizes the issue and it can be applied both ways, making it the kind of struggle Peterson accuses feminists of having - vying for power because nothing but that is real.

You certainly could do the same to Peterson, even where that point shouldn't be sufficient to discredit the point he's making. You could surely look at him and say that he's referencing philosophers/psychologists who got accused of anti-semitism, like Nietzsche, or worse, were anti-semitic, like Jung. He's fine with Jung fudging evidence too, all for the cause. You could make the case that he uses these people to argue against Jewish intellectuals like the Marx, the Frankfurt school, Postmodernists, scapegoating them into plotting to kill western culture and destroy the west as we know it. This is while he flirts with the alt-right by sending them pepe memes, appearing on their shows and making traditionalist and cultural arguments right out of their woodwork. I could say he's a cultural nazi! And he will destroy western freedoms the same way Nazis did! He gives a lazy theory called cultural marxism at leftwing people, well, the nazis did pretty much the same with cultural bolshevism, which is much the same theory and look where that got them. Do you think that's fair?!

While that paragraph is certainly not a good way to understand Peterson, he really does make his actual points vulnerable to the sort of analysis he does, too, often more so than the people he criticizes. His pragmatism, religious hypertruths are vulnerable to saying he doesn't believe in fact, as I said. I mean, he really doesn't, not as we atheists who believe in objective scientific fact do, believe in fact. He says it himself. Under such pragmatism, the way he counts the deaths caused by marxists, one could count the deaths capitalism has caused as well. We could even throw in the theories how capitalists support nazism if it ever comes to that or giving up their capital to socialists. Under that theory, maybe capitalists are responsible for the world war. There's plenty of ways you can depict your opponents if you're this kind of pragmatist, and he doesn't look good if you do that to him at all. He throws the dominance hierarchy at marxists trying to say the world isn't just, well, can't we say the same about his rift with academia.

So even applying Peterson's criticism to what he says seems downright cruel and horribly unproductive. It would only get cheers from people who already disagree with him. So, his bigger picture look at them (point 4 in your post) cannot be said to be fair, because it would invalidate everything else we want as well. Even if it was true, which it is not, it's still not an excuse to misunderstand postmodernism and critical theory in points 1 and 2 and 3 either.

The sort of argumentation he does could be a fun way to get ideas, and it's good if it gets you to make your bed, but it's not useful in engaging critics. There, you need to be careful, show that you understand what you speak about, make points that can be agreed upon by both sides. If somebody quotes you sentence by sentence, fix your sentences or show them how what they say doesn't fit with how the sentence should be interpreted in your broader work. Don't just disengage from careful argument, because that is the only way forward. Work towards dialectic.

Does this give some insight on why I think Peterson is bad at engaging the very people he should convince, leftwing academics, and instead just polarized the issue and preached to the choir - people who are already inclined to be anti-academia or ready to buy into shoddy theories about postmodernism? I hope it at least gives you a better idea of why I think such disagreements have to be handled a certain way, and how Peterson's handling of it is different.

wow, thanks for the response.
I agree with you in large parts. In the totality of his views and so on, I'm not on board with what he says, but that's the case with almost all people who say things... If some kid now thinks, that 'Postmodernism' equals evil Communism then that's their problem.
He has a psychologizing view on Philosophy and you have to be aware of the defects such a perspective brings with it. To say he isn't qualified to talk about Philosophy without being a 'Philosopher' is missing the point. Because that's exactly his appeal.

I think psychologizing your opponents just isn't a good way to engage people in politics. I also think that it's his fault that people take him as seriously as they do, because he has consistently conveyed the importance of his own cause in absurdly exaggerated terms.

My problem is with this kind of debates , on the whole with philosophy is in the deep foundation of your post.
You are critical, so you deconstruct arguments and then you interpret them , and here and there you show your subjective viewpoint.
I'm gonna try to not address you point by point the way I usually do when I write something serious because soon we are writing books and bog down ourselves in definitions, rough simplifications etc.
I'm too tired but I respect that you wrote down something this long filled with thoughts. Lets be clear about that.
My problem is that -if I can put it simply- that you ask for more intellectual rigor from Peterson.
Here is where your personality comes into view.
When you are engaged in a field professionally you are not necessarily talk complete smack in other fields.
The way I see it the real intelligent folks are curious and enabled to talk about variety of topics. There are many examples of people in history that put down revolutionary or even just very well received material in multiple fields (or neighboring ones at least). Or just simple nobodies that rocked the scene and people were hell bent to destroy them until they had to concede.
I hope I can skip giving you examples but I'm thinking mostly mathematics, physics.
All in all I reject that Peterson is not an expert in philosophy. He is actively engaged in that field for many years and wrote a book - I consider maps of meaning a philosophical book. But I don't see how you can even quantify expertise in philosophy, which is my main beef with it. For me it is garbage.
So it seems to me that when you ask for more rigor, you are right on principle. But up the ante.
If we look at that recent debate between Peterson and the blond English woman - and other examples are abound - we can plainly see that the other party fails on elementary logic / statistical knowledge and that comes way before we can talk about rigor. Or we can take one of his first debates with a pro transgender doctor and lecturer that said there is no biological difference between man and woman. You should not be and expert in biology to see how that is false, but he is a lecturer of trans gender studies and has a doctorate?
My rigor asks for quantitative data. If there is no quantitative data for me it is basically shit talk. You can talk shit on your " own " field easily.
On my measuring stick Peterson talks significantly less shit than the other members of this debate should I say war that far left successfully started.

I accept academics from other fields, I'd even celebrate them. However, there is a certain amount of expertise that you need to show when commenting, otherwise, it becomes clear that you have not considered the relevant criteria and so there's little point in engaging you. Peterson has consistently shown to not understand the basic ideas behind postmodernism or critical theory. He also doesn't seem to have read enough, or retained enough knowledge about feminism. Well then, what is the point of his criticism? He is the problem he is trying to solve - namely, lazy, wishful thinking instead of rigorous thought.

I understand that we may not agree on the value of philosophy, I'm not sure such a difference can be reconciled in one conversation. I would ask you to try and pay attention to the details about feminism or postmodernism in these debates - they certainly matter, and I don't think there is any way to avoid it in this debate at all. If we reject their relevance then there is no debate, you cannot really reject nor accepted postmodernism, Marxism, feminism, conservatism or anything else.

That's what I'd say about philosophy - it's not as clear-cut as science a lot of the time, but unfortunately, it's what we have and what we need. If you want to comment on whether something is good, moral, or should happen, you need philosophy. If you want to talk politics, ideologies, freedom, you need philosophy. If you want to talk knowledge, what is fact, what is science, why should we follow science and not astrology, you need philosophy. Law is but a bastardized version of it. What can you do if you reject it? Of course, science informs on these, but it can never make the final step in deciding it.

One more thing. You say Peterson talks signfiicantly less shit than the other side. Have you read the other side? Asking this because generally people seem to form their opinions on Marxism or Feminism based on youtube videos by amateurs, or the news, not literal Feminist or Marxist books. I'd say it's important to do that before forming your own opinion, otherwise we can be stuck arguing against straw-men.

His critique is: Critical Theory and Postmodernism only criticize and describe (which is true) but what is left, if all you do is criticize? You still have not found an answer to all the important questions and considering you are a human being you need to engage the world in a way and in order to do that you need positive values and a structure and an order.If you only criticize and show how all structure is a power relation (which is what Foucault at least does f.e.) and the implication is that power structures imply oppression and are therfore are to be avoided (Foucault at least doesn't claim that, but it is implicit in all the political groups which refer or read Foucault), then this will lead to a denial of reality, because and then all his psychological stuff comes into play about how people need hierarchies and are basically a wulfpack. This is a notion that one can debate. But guys, stop with the claim that he needs to read and understand and criticize Derrida or others on an academic level, it doesn't debunk his thinking.

it's important to recognize peterson's appeals to pragmatism here, where some value for spiritual (and religious) practice is demonstrated empirically (according to peterson) through personal practice. in my experience, academics and intellectuals refrain from practicing spirituality and religion with good faith as a matter of principle, and so delude themselves about the value of such practice as related to determination of meaning and value in existence. sam harris's 'waking up' is a nice academic/intellectual perspective of things like mindfulness and zen buddhism, though he retains much of his reticence to value these things pervades the work. many of peterson's points about spirtuality/religion are analogous to buddhist ideals.

You probably wanted to answer son1dow, but anyhow:
Agree, large parts of his thinking are influenced from the pragmatist stance which is informed by his work and studies about happiness and so on;
but I don't think it's only pragmatist.It's also the refusal to believe, that life has no meaning, but that there is meaning beyond the mere acknowledgment of meaning out of a pragmatic strive for happiness. This does not have to be a meaning in a christian corset inspired by religion, but born out of a decision and a will for meaning.

You are welcome, though my track record is famously spotless considering polite and measured replies. So thats just how I roll really.

. Peterson has consistently shown to not understand the basic ideas behind postmodernism or critical theory. He also doesn't seem to have read enough, or retained enough knowledge about feminism. Well then, what is the point of his criticism? He is the problem he is trying to solve - namely, lazy, wishful thinking instead of rigorous thought.

I dont see this at all. He had multiple debates with feminists (multiple academics and visited universities and answered questions from students as well) and it is the other party that gets blown out of the water. He is also a Harvard lecturer and a full professor in Toronto. I don't mention this to argue for his authority. But it is psychically impossible to be a professor and being not well read at the same time. He mentions that he reads copious amount of Marxist philosophy. Considering the above mentioned track record, this seems probable.
If he misses basic ideas it would be easy to defeat him in these public debates. That I have not seen.

If you want to comment on whether something is good, moral, or should happen, you need philosophy. If you want to talk politics, ideologies, freedom, you need philosophy. If you want to talk knowledge, what is fact, what is science, why should we follow science and not astrology, you need philosophy. Law is but a bastardized version of it. What can you do if you reject it? Of course, science informs on these, but it can never make the final step in deciding it.

Science gives answers that are reproductable and predictable. It doesn't matter if you are left wing or right wing, communist or capitalist. There are of course issues about morality, ethics that it handles clumsily but those stuff should be easy to handle if someone born a human and value logic and knowledge.

One more thing. You say Peterson talks signfiicantly less shit than the other side. Have you read the other side? Asking this because generally people seem to form their opinions on Marxism or Feminism based on youtube videos by amateurs, or the news, not literal Feminist or Marxist books. I'd say it's important to do that before forming your own opinion, otherwise we can be stuck arguing against straw-men.

No, I haven't and I don't plan to. I thought about a lot about answering your question. First I'm not gonna lie that was sure but I honestly tried to think up a reason to read about that stuff. The problem is that however clean (and I really doubt even that) are the original sources, people always bastardize ideologies. I don't think that originally Marx wanted stalin to kill millions or the suffering of millions. Or Jesus wanted a bunch of guys to go and crusade and plunder. Or even what they wanted: ppl dont stone here women, though there is an ideology that calls for it in some cases.
But you said it: amateurs. Peterson for me does not debate with the sources, or with the ideologies. He debates with the representatives of those ideologies. Those representatives that have political power. For me, those representatives talk obvious nonsense a heck of a lot, for example I don't have to read any feminist philosophy book to know that there are differences between the sexes, I know that from biology.
They are straight up dangerous and they attack free speech which is very dangerous. On principle that should be rejected.
So you can say that a true feminist ideologue thinks wholly logically and makes sense but from what I see, she is the last these people ask when they come to push legislation or policy. And thats what matters here.

I cut your post up into pieces that launch my points, sorry if that's annoying for you, I'm just referencing what is relevant for my reply. Not focusing on one word here, trying to get the general idea of what you're saying. Feel no pressure to reply in a long form or reply at all if you don't care to.

I dont see this at all. He had multiple debates with feminists (multiple academics and visited universities and answered questions from students as well) and it is the other party that gets blown out of the water.
<...>
If he misses basic ideas it would be easy to defeat him in these public debates. That I have not seen.

You know, this is a thing that the leftists in academia believe in that I'll stand up for. Debate doesn't convince people of the truth, it convinces them that the charismatic person is right. All the studies for anything related to it seem to show this, from the one's I've seen at least. I really wish it was true of course, and similar sentiment is probably what makes the idea popular.

I think getting at the truth by reading and and considering the arguments and writing them out is so, so superior to this. I don't really agree that he blew them out of the water in some cases, for example he just gave his Marxist shpiel about horrible consequences that have little do with the law in question while the others were talking about law, and said that he was just wrong about it. From what I learned, it seems they were right. He was certainly more charismatic than them though, and as I said I don't put much stock in debates. Better just read the people, especially as most of them would never give Peterson the platform by debating him.

At the same time, I explained several things where his reasoning isn't good at all, and which indicate that the sources he draws from for philosophy are bad - like the Hicks book reviews, the cultural marxism video, the SEP article on what postmodernism actually is. A document by an association of thousands of lawyers and law professors. Those are quite authoritative sources, why not consider them over your impression of a debate?

He is also a Harvard lecturer and a full professor in Toronto. I don't mention this to argue for his authority. But it is psychically impossible to be a professor and being not well read at the same time.

Closer to impossible to be a professor in one area and be very well read in another. Your main area of expertise takes SO MUCH TIME to develop. It's insane. It is definitely not the case that you need to be well read in Marxism to become a clinical psychologist. Which isn't to say he couldn't be if he cared to, just that you'd probably check with relevant academics to see if he did it right so you don't waste your time.

Science gives answers that are reproductable and predictable. It doesn't matter if you are left wing or right wing, communist or capitalist. There are of course issues about morality, ethics that it handles clumsily but those stuff should be easy to handle if someone born a human and value logic and knowledge.

Does it really seem to you like just valuing logic and knowledge is easy and straightforward? You can't just will it. There's so many smart people around the world working hard on it, and we still have so many problems and so many disputes on how we should deal with them. And, that knowledge includes philosophy, and logic is part of philosophy / math!

No, I haven't and I don't plan to. I thought about a lot about answering your question. First I'm not gonna lie that was sure but I honestly tried to think up a reason to read about that stuff. The problem is that however clean (and I really doubt even that) are the original sources, people always bastardize ideologies. I don't think that originally Marx wanted stalin to kill millions or the suffering of millions. Or Jesus wanted a bunch of guys to go and crusade and plunder. Or even what they wanted: ppl dont stone here women, though there is an ideology that calls for it in some cases.

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”

&#8213; John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

That's the ultimate truth of it, however, it's not completely necessary. You can just talk policy. But you have to read the critical parts, how they frame their arguments, you can't just hear them from people who criticize them. Whether Feminists are wrong or right, if they say that people don't understand them and you check and people are strawmanning their positions on sex, gender, equality, etc again and again, in a very basic way, from the very definitions, you can't help but feel like they're right. They are being strawmanned, and it will go nowhere until people actually value knowledge enough to try and understand eachother.

But you said it: amateurs. Peterson for me does not debate with the sources, or with the ideologies. He debates with the representatives of those ideologies. Those representatives that have political power. For me, those representatives talk obvious nonsense a heck of a lot, for example I don't have to read any feminist philosophy book to know that there are differences between the sexes, I know that from biology.

Unfortunately, he does talk ideologies and policies, only he truly engages neither, just wrapping them into his own philosophy(!), not even his view on policy. Seriously, listen to him talk - he is certainly not just talking policy, Jungian archetypes and lobsters etc are not policy. He rants about Postmodernism not because he wants to focus on policy.

Which is not to say that the feminists or Marxists are right or wrong, just that he hasn't engaged them properly. Discuss policy if you want but get their full views on policy. Discuss philosophy with them if you want, but read their views from them. Show them that they're wrong about free speech, but talk specifics, what specific thing does what to free speech, and don't rant (like many do) about how the left has a problem with free speech unless you, as a person who values free speech, have noticed how the right including Trump has a problem with free speech. Free speech isn't partisan.

You know, this is a thing that the leftists in academia believe in that I'll stand up for. Debate doesn't convince people of the truth, it convinces them that the charismatic person is right. All the studies for anything related to it seem to show this, from the one's I've seen at least. I really wish it was true of course, and similar sentiment is probably what makes the idea popular.

So I don't see the facts he brings, the logic, but I compare the charisma?
I'm not people, and I don't care about charisma. For me the facts and logic matter.

I think getting at the truth by reading and and considering the arguments and writing them out is so, so superior to this. I don't really agree that he blew them out of the water in some cases,

most of the cases on youtube are simple smackdowns he administers and it is plain to see. So much so that people made highlight videos. You contradict a simple fact here.

for example he just gave his Marxist shpiel about horrible consequences that have little do with the law in question while the others were talking about law, and said that he was just wrong about it.

What I saw that he was talking to Canadian legislators, politicians and some of them asked the same tired feminist questions. Mind you, not legal questions, but basically why cant we be friends type of questions.
He was just wrong about it, thats not factual.

From what I learned, it seems they were right.

From what I learned, it seems they were wrong. Forced speech is not free speech and that message is really simple.

Closer to impossible to be a professor in one area and be very well read in another.

I have friends in academia, and this is just plainly not true. One of my friend is an engineer and teached around 10 years on the university after his doctorate.He also did a 5 year degree in psychology (the rank before doctorate). There are multiple examples of this. What you wrote is just nonsense.

Your main area of expertise takes SO MUCH TIME to develop. It's insane. It is definitely not the case that you need to be well read in Marxism to become a clinical psychologist

Yes and here you just jump the ship hard. There is nothing that implies that you should learn marxist theory the same time while you are learning to be a clinical psychologist and thats why it is impossible, that is just illogical. You can do it one after the other and he is closing on 60 he had plenty of time. My friend is 36.

I just plainly refuse your quote of stuart hill. Simply because I told you what is the reason for not reading them. You have to made an argument that doesn't crosses fundamental biology, law or even common sense before I look into what you say. Otherwise a flat earther or young earth creationist could argue that until I have read much of the stupid books they wrote and listened 100s of hours of youtube vids and visited noahs ark they have built I can't correctly evaluate their theories. But I can, after minutes. They are just nonsense.

you can't just hear them from people who criticize them.

You seem to forget that I watched debates and those have at least two sides.

only he truly engages neither, just wrapping them into his own philosophy(!)

It is what the other party definitely does when pushing for forced speech or argues with refuted, badly made research and that is the side that passes legislations. You write that sentence so nonchalantly while you talk about philosophy as it is all encompassing then you (!) -it when it comes to Peterson. Thats strange, seems like the guy cant do anything well. But he had no time for sure, because how can you be a professor, teach and go to those debates and interviews and be good at it, right.

summary

I think you are wrong on multiple fronts.
You frame arguments. Your logic isn't sound.
You try to use valid reasons for criticizing him like proper way and rigor, but then it falls apart because you are unable to see that the other side fails on almost every metric that we use to evaluate an argument, the least of it is rigor.
You also don't use incredible rigor when you argue, so by now I doubt that you really know what you are talking about. You are anything but factual. Your arguments are vague and sometimes flat out contradict reality. I'm not the first here with this assessment I see. You will never be understood because you fundamentally misunderstand what is happening even if you adhere to seemingly solid principles like argumentative rigor.

most of the cases on youtube are simple smackdowns he administers and it is plain to see. So much so that people made highlight videos. You contradict a simple fact here.

Indeed, there is an industry of smackdowns on youtube. It is characteristic of exactly the kind of debate that pretends to be educational, but instead is just an emotional rollercoaster for folk, few of which do the actual research themselves.

So do you refuse to just look up the document from the association of tens thousands of lawyers?

I have friends in academia, and this is just plainly not true. One of my friend is an engineer and teached around 10 years on the university after his doctorate.He also did a 5 year degree in psychology (the rank before doctorate). There are multiple examples of this. What you wrote is just nonsense.

I said closer to, specifically replying to what you said about it being impossible to be a professor without being well read. As if that implies that he is well read in marxist theory! That's why I said it, to contradict your overconfident implication that his credentials are somehow evidence of his knowledge of marxism/feminism/PoMo. I also later say that indeed it is possible to do it, so obviously I don't mean that it's impossible. I was just showing that your point about him being well read [in marxism/feminism/PoMo] because he's a professor is false.

I'm curious, does his track record that you respect for you come from those debates? How do you know that he's accurate about anything he says? Referencing facts about biology doesn't make his shpiel about feminist, authoritarianism, postmodernism or law true.

I just plainly refuse your quote of stuart hill. Simply because I told you what is the reason for not reading them. You have to made an argument that doesn't crosses fundamental biology, law or even common sense before I look into what you say. Otherwise a flat earther or young earth creationist could argue that until I have read much of the stupid books they wrote and listened 100s of hours of youtube vids and visited noahs ark they have built I can't correctly evaluate their theories. But I can, after minutes. They are just nonsense.

Indeed, I have. I gave you a reference for lawyer commentary for C16, I gave you a video by a professor talking about the history of "cultural marxism", I gave you a link to SEP on postmodernism. I gave you authoritative sources that do not in any way infringe upon science, and indeed, in no way reject academia, unlike Peterson, who has openly done that. It seems he is closer to the flat earthers who indoctrinates his viewers through debates rather than sources which are accepted in academia. Indeed, his way of convincing you through debate is exactly what a flat earther would want you to do.

If you don't have time for that it's fine, nobody forces you to, just don't accuse me of arguing like a flat earther when indeed, the type of evidence you consult is much more like them than the type of evidence that I have brought.

So do you refuse to just look up the document from the association of tens thousands of lawyers?

I don't, but there is a reason why 10 000 lawyers do the same thing and also that number in itself is not argument. If you had said 10 000 scientist, then I would be 10 000 times more careful but what they do is neatly explained by another lawyer : they simply sign everything that comes into the mail to get it over with.

they've done nothing that would involve the law, just a bunch of administrators talking shit and not doing anything formal in terms of law. Call me when somebody has to call a trans person 'xhzey' by compelled speech as said by a court and neither the name, nor they will do.

You misinterpret it willfully. The law came from the same sentiment these people tried to push on that girl.
This law did not come out of thin air, a whole bunch of people lobbied for it with the same feelings and interpretation of the world. Also, again Peterson told that this will happen while almost all the proponents told that this isn't gonna happen. I wonder if that girl wouldnt have been that tough we had learn about this affair, but my bet is 10 out of 8 people just shut the fuck up when they are threatened with legal carrier etc ramifications. Moreover you dont seem to understand what law really is, so I will teach you a bit about it (these are real cases)

1. A murderer slashes his ex girlfriends throat, he walks with suspended penalty, because he is underage and he was "momentarily crazy" whatever excuse . He had one of the best lawyers , president of the lawyers association, dr and teacher in a law school etc and a rich family

2. a poor drunk guy attacks the ambulance crew, no notable damage in property or physical harm, he hits one of the ambulance men but he is quickly rendered harmless. He gets 12 years in prison. He has a public lawyer in lieu of money.

Law is interpretation. What this law does, it just opens up the possibility to punish someone, or as we can see, threaten.It functions now as a wedge in Canadian society. It is one component of a dangerous symptome.

319 (1) Every one who, by communicating statements in any public place, incites hatred against any identifiable group where such incitement is likely to lead to a breach of the peace is guilty of

(a) an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or

(b) an offence punishable on summary conviction.

Marginal note:Wilful promotion of hatred
(2) Every one who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group is guilty of

(a) an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or

(b) an offence punishable on summary conviction.

So , how you interpret hatred? Could it be a misuse of a pronoun? Maybe that could lead to violence, hm? A lil breach of peace?

But please. don't answer. Just spare our time. I have read a wall of text from you and your arguments lack force, practicality and here and there you have a straight childish adherence to some kind of world order, hierarchy ,social roles, institutions because you think they are doing justice while Peterson just represents chaos. Call me when you can understand that there are bad laws, bad leaders, bad lawyers , bad societies, bad precedents, bad structures that should be taken down -or to make an attempt to do that- by men like Peterson.

I don't really understand what view of law, society and Peterson's views you have. It sounds like your argument works against half of our social order rather than just these specific laws. I agree that there are bad everythings. I'm not sure if I agree about the extend of this, since your arguments seem to be against anti-murder laws as much as they are against C-16, but I definitely agree that there's a lot of bad stuff within our legal systems. Besides, Peterson is a staunch conservative as far as philosophy is concerned - the sort of change you propose seems to be waaaay too ambitious for his liking, he likes people being careful and adhering to the structures you're criticizing right now.

To me all these depend on the particulars, and from where I'm standing, the particulars aren't like Peterson says, that's my issue. It's not that I agree with all of law, far from it.

I don't propose changes to the existing laws that is the point and it is the same for P, he acted out because of the changes, he did not make anarchist vids and I'm also not an anarchist.
Very hard to take this seriously anymore, so I'm not gonna.
You opened a thread and from esr mostly the well spoken, intelligent folks provided ample input.
It would be best to at least refine your views, but frankly I don't see the way out for you.
What happened here is horrible.

yes, he can use them against c-16. he doesn't have to qualify why it's different. just because somebody speaks out against one thing does not mean that they are obligated or required to speak out against other things. you're really good at deluding yourself. you're speaking out against jordan peterson being wrong here in this thread, how can you speak out against jordan peterson being wrong without speaking out against everybody else being wrong? how can you dare to speak out of turn that way?

'm not gonna qualify anything. Just read what other people said about it here I'm not gonna spoon feed you the same stuff again. If those walls of text doesn't got to you, I'd rather save my time. As I said, it is hard even impossible to take this seriously anymore. Numerous people explained you the same thing you showed that you are just as incapable to understand what they told you as you are evaluating Peterson and the opposing site.

I agree with your summary. I'm glad not to be the only one to see through his vague attempts of posing his argument. He writes a page to say basically nothing of value and his own interpretations are fundamentally squewed.

this whole rant seems so empty of substance, I see no disproving points at all. what's your point on his views and opinions? are you a feminist and socialist?

I only listened to this guy once about feminism and for my knowledge and understanding it was spot on - it really is the bane of modern society. I really don't care if he cannot build rock solid proofs as feminism in itself is just wild fantasizing while disregarding biology, logic basically all sciences. so why should this shit be taught or integrated in academia or every day life?

I'm neither feminist nor a socialist, although some libertarians would consider most europeans that, so depends from perspective, I guess.

I'm not sure we agree on what substance is - I think I pointed to a lot of things that he says that discredit his knowledge and his conclusions. If you want something more specific, go ahead and ask, it was an overview after all. Otherwise, my point is that since he is wrong a lot, if you want to read something criticizing feminism or marxism or leftists, there are plenty serious sources who understand them and criticize them correctly.

After all, criticizing something without rigor is how you get something like ridiculous radical feminism, otherkins, attack helicopters and other garbage. I assume nobody here wants that.

You seem confused as to why people are excited about Peterson. People aren't excited because they get to go and read a book to slightly enlarge their understanding, then continue to plod along in life, like you seem to suggest as a worthy alternative. They are excited because someone who has read and understood the system has finally broken the mold to go after these ideologies.

Would like to know, what you mean with criticize feminism, marxism or leftism correctly?

One can crizicize certain policies of marxists, leftists, feminists. Or one can engage them at their core philosophical postulations JBP makes both. In fact he tries to illustrate how specific policies are a result of those postulations/presuppositions (whether they actually are presuppositions or not is a question of your epistemological position, I guess).

His ideas about dominance hierarchies are once again just some basic intuitions about evolution that allow him to get into absurdly certain conclusions, like that feminists are there to destroy the proper meritocratic dominance hierarchies that are there for a reason. Well then, why isn't it the other way around, why after he was rejected by academia *1 didn't he decide that perhaps the oldest meritocratic dominance hierarchy rejected him? *2

just using this vague intuition to support whatever he wants *3

another one of those youtubers that make self-encompassing content *4 and rant about debate and dialectic while enjoying fandom which largely doesn't engage with their detractors *5

he rejects the idea of truth that nearly all of us take in favor of a murky view of truth *6

In terms of postmodernism, it has been well covered that he has no idea what is going on *7

Just read wokeupabug's comments in that thread M1zzu recently linked, as well as so many others *8

Makes you wonder how they can doublethink their way into doing that while still considerig themselves intellectuals. Very few people repeating this nonsense even know what critical theory is, yet they're sure as it is bringing the downfall of western civilization. Talk about drinking the kool-aid. *9

Perhaps the worst is his rejection of academia, although this story is as old and unsurprising as academia itself. I won't go into it too much, just point out that after all he has said on the limited basis he has said it, he also uses to reject like half of academia. Here's a link, onwards for like 3 minutes *10

From all I've learned about his ideas on law, on C16, they seem to be wrong as well, but this is largely outside this context so I won't go into it other than dropping a link. *11

Note how all of this connects. Peterson goes outside of his field *12

Just own your views *13

*1 - I'd like some evidence that academia has rejected him.
*2 - If they had in fact rejected him, it would be down to post modern neo-marxism infecting the universities. Oh and where is his evidence? He works and lives in that world.
*3 - Vague intuition? All of his theories are backed up by hard evidence, including the lobster story which you mentioned as an example of this.
*4 - You're comparing him to low tier political youtubers? This guy is a published clinical psychologist, he has published over 100 documents academically - how on earth you compare that to the average youtuber is beyond me.
*5 - You say he doesn't engage with his detractors? Well he has debated any academic who has openly criticized him, and gladly invites anyone else who wants to on many occasions.
*6 - He rejects a truth that nearly all of us accept? What are you talking about? He is against the idea that everything in the world has no solid foundation or basis and has an infinite number of ways to be interpreted. I'm sorry but I don't think that 'nearly all of us' accept that kind of ideology.
*7 - Covered where exactly, in your brain? Sources please, and make it reputable please.
*8 - wokeupabug doesn't seem to be familiar with JP's work, he is analysing Hicks quite presumptuously, Then reading the rest of that thread most of these experts are basically arguing where to pigeonhole JP so that they can criticize the domain he's been placed in, rather than the man himself.
*9 - You debating his 'disciples' doesn't really prove anything. Go and debate a radical 3rd wave feminist and see what kind of an intellectual drain pipe that takes you down instead for comparison.
*10 - He talks about student loans and how you cannot remove them with bankruptcy, similar to indentured servitude. I recently visited my old home town in the UK for Christmas, and what change did I see since my last visit 5 years ago? A Massive increase in student housing all over the city. Most of the shops in the city centre have closed down and turned into cafes and eateries. There are homeless on the streets, all over the place. There are no jobs - but guess what they do have? A real nice and tasty way to get bums on seats at uni, for all those delicious loans. He talks the truth and you just brush it off, what world do you live in?
*11 - I'm sorry but how can you not watch the Senate hearing on bill C16 and not realise that those people are absolutely clueless? Here is the entire recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnIAAkSNtqo but you only need to see this to understand how clueless they are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEfgf2GRk3Q - oh and here is another small clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q9aznYUncM - How can you see that and feel safe that people that clueless are making law? At least JP is actually trying to do something about it.
*12 - He goes outside of his field in the same way post modern neo-marxism infects every aspect of modern life. He has to go there, because he is the most credible person prepared to challenge it.
*13 - But what are your views? After reading all of this exasperating post I still cannot work out your angle other than to disparage JP. Doesn't any of this creep in to your every day life? Where do you live, inside a chocolate factory?

That's pretty difficult given how nobody in academia seriously engages with his views outside of his own field. Supposedly the fact that he is not read or critiqued could be considered a rejection, the same way the earth sciences department I'm in doesn't engage with the people on esoteric TV channels selling you stones which supposedly have healing powers.

You're comparing him to low tier political youtubers? This guy is a published clinical psychologist, he has published over 100 documents academically - how on earth you compare that to the average youtuber is beyond me.

In the context of his videos and philosophical views, he is just another of these youtubers. I don't see why his academic success in a different field would make him anything else. I'd be willing to see him as a legitimate authority on jungian psychology, but not necessarily other things. You can get tenure perfectly fine in more or less any field without knowing much about any other field except the ones tangentially related to yours (i.e. as an earth scientist, you need to know some chemistry and physics).

If they had in fact rejected him, it would be down to post modern neo-marxism infecting the universities. [...] the same way post modern neo-marxism infects every aspect of modern life.

lol I wish. Two questions: 1. Have you been to a university, and what field? 2. Have you actually read any marxist or postmodernist authors?

1 - What M1zzu says is absolutely true. I should clarify the general statement though. He's still obviously tolerated, hasn't bee thrown from his job (although I suspect it might be due to the scandal it would cause rather than not wanting to do it) and he enjoys a subtle following among some professors, in particular ones from hard sciences. He has however been met with a consistent negative reaction from the soft sciences and humanities. As M1zzu explains, it's mostly a silent rejection, and that speaks volumes, but there are definitely more outward signs of it:
He has spoken volumes about his own battles with his own university, about feeling like he'll lose his job, about negative signs from his administration, about nobody wanting to debate him, about trouble holding those debates. I assume you've seen it yourself? This includes debates during which the academics didn't exactly give him a warm welcome, and praised other academics who exercised their free speech by not attending those debates. He has also commented on the value of academia in a video I linked from JRE.
The law report rejecting Peterson's views I linked is from an association of, I cite: I write on behalf of the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) to urge Senators to pass Bill C-16, An Act to
amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code, without amendment. The CBA is a
national association of 36,000 lawyers, Québec notaries, law professors and students, with a mandate
to promote improvements in the law and the administration of justice.
A teacher at a university was recently reprimanded just for showing his clip - a blunder by the university, in my mind, but still evidence of his rejection.
After the free speech loving Peterson once again threatened to put some university courses under surveillance (and likely under some attention from his fans, some of whom are quite angry and disgruntled), his university faculty association put out a comment:

The University of Toronto Faculty Association released a statement on Friday condemning Peterson’s website plan, without naming him directly; the group said it was “alarmed to learn that a web site may be under construction that is designed to place under surveillance certain kinds of academic content.”

It's kinda funny that he thought the plan itself was technically feasible, but that is besides the point. I hope this is plenty?

2 - Right. Except it's one guy saying it about many many many many other guys at universities. Are we to trust his personal experience above theirs, when he's not even getting basic ideas of postmodernism and feminism right while faulting them with it?

I second M1zzu's questions. I'm curious how you arrived at your views of Postmodernism, and why you even leap to Peterson's defense.

3 - Even if it is, although I'm unconvinced that it's hard evidence that this applies to humans, the vague intuition is about postmodernists undermining legitimate dominance hierarchies, whereas whenever he is undermined by something, or he undermines that thing, it doesn't light up his mind with the notion that perhaps he's the rejected lobster. Surely you agree that this weak metaphorical argument doesn't give you anything?

4 - Sure, he's smarter and more accomplished than they are. He is however gaining all of this attention and notoriety as a famous internet person among young white males who have never met him, but learned about him online. Unfortunately, he's also spreading memes which are typical for internet conspiracy theorists, like the ones about postmodernism and cultural marxism.

The more important point that his content is intended to wholistically teach you about postmodernism, the horrors of it, how it relates to feminism and how they are destroying western culture. In a way that doesn't engage the authors, and does not require you to have read them to understand the criticism. That's the problem - the fact that he's giving people prepackaged conspiracies that don't even require reading the original thing they're based on, with very few of the listeners going ahead and checking the real sources being criticized. In this sense he is exactly like a typical youtuber.

5 - He doesn't seem to select the ones who know something about Postmodernism or Marxism, no. Although I haven't denied that for the most part it's the academics who don't want to debate him [or give him attention in any other way]. He could still however find plenty less accomplished academics who would be willing to do it, or just comment more on the relevant books himself. He seems to focus on just spreading the same old tired conspiracies which are contradicted by a cursory reading of the topics at hand. So the comment is more about what I think he should focus on.

6 - Pragmatic truth over truth period is the claim there. That's what Peterson holds. Check out his JRE podcast about his views on "hypertruth", or "religious truth" which supersede's truth in his mind. Also check out his Harris podcast on his commitment to pragmatism. The reason this is ironic is because these commit him to a metaphorical, very murky truths, and trusting them, considering them more true over hard facts like 2 / 2 = 1 or whatever else you find in a science textbook. He literally believes that, and then goes on to criticize relativists for rejecting objective fact... The irony is incredible, of course. Do you accept his views on pragmatism and religious truth? Do you not find them close to the relativism that he so vehemently criticizes?

I did explain it though surrounding that sentence, read more carefully next time.

7 - Academics don't usually like giving him attention, as I said. However the criticism I have given on Hicks applies perfectly - it's based on nonsense, the review shows. You could also do with some cursory reading about postmodernism, and how it's more of a form of skepticism towards some claims that you might yourself reject rather than nihilism or relativism like Peterson claims. I surely hope you've read enough about postmodernism yourself, otherwise, why would you believe his claims in the first place? Faith? I also gave a link explaining the cultural marxism conspiracy theory.

8 - He's giving you a review by a qualified person and commenting on Hicks. Are you saying Peterson diverges from Hicks very significantly in his views about postmodernism, or why else do you not see the relevance? Is this the kind of "pigeonholing" you disagree with? I'm not getting what it is about Peterson's incredibly lazy hack of an understanding of postmodernism that makes you cling to it in the face of academics of relevant fields telling you that it's nonsense.

9 - It's a bit unfortunate that there exist radical feminists who are academics and write complicated books outlining their arguments, and so there are feminists who would be able to provide those arguments that I'm not confortable with engaging prior to reading the books. With Peterson, meanwhile, it seems I'm left with debating those disciples because nobody more educated will believe him. That's a bit of a problem.

10 - I'm not rejecting him for his comments on student loans, those are in fact, in my opinion at least, much better covered by the leftists who he so badly hates. The professors themselves seem to share the same opinions as well. I wouldn't expect you to bring this up about a economically rightwing professor, anyway, since he's quite reluctant about helping out those students with welfare. Does he suggest we give them free education? I'll admit that that's to his credit if so.

What I dislike is his rejection of the value of his education, and his slander of it based on his ideas about postmodernism and the like. That's what's horrible.

11 - Generally, I don't really care if Peterson scored debate points against politicians. I didn't think politicians were competent in the first place, I just argued that it seems like mainstream legal opinion (of experts) disagrees with Peterson's interpretation of the law. If he was to do something to make politicians more educated, I'd encourage it, but considering his dislike of academia, his disagreements with mainstream lawyers, his attempts at killing some university courses, his attempts at founding dubious private(?)/online/not-properly-accredited universities and his love of religion, tradition and pragmatic truth, I have doubts about whether he's the right champion for that.

12 - I have provided many reasons for why I do not think he understands these topics. I would like it if you explained what you have read of these topics, what you think and why you think that. I don't see how we can move on with you repeating that he is qualified contrary to all evidence, otherwise.

13 - I'm just a dude online who likes philosophy, is interested in politics, including whatever of it goes online, who likes and is interested in public discourse and considering its' level and impact. The whole Postmodernism, Cultural Marxism propaganda war and how it relates to politics is in the intersection of that and in my opinion is portrayed in a very bad way. Peterson has been a focal figure in it recently. Furthermore, he is one that appeals to many people otherwise like me. So I guess that's where I'm coming from in terms of criticizing Peterson.

I'd love it if you could comment on the questions I gave for that one Anonymous dude in this thread:

Let me ask you something though. What makes it okay to say that postmodernism is relativistic when it isn't? What makes it okay to say postmodernism is against rationality when the postmodern philosophers talked at length about trying to make the world more rational? What makes it okay to say that it agrees with feminism or Marxism when it's criticizing all metanarratives? What makes it okay to demonize it for ruining our culture when it's a somewhat small school of philosophy that is neither nihilistic nor is the cause for whatever amounts of modern nihilism there are in the popular culture? What makes it okay to say that feminism or Marxism is relativistic, when these are modernist philosophies which in seemingly all aspects are the opposite of that - they give a unifying narrative to the world.

How much more charity could we apply here? The grasp of postmodernism as a broad, complicated movement is completely lost with this kind of thinking. This isn't about credentials, these are mistakes that would discredit anyone talking about these topics.

It doesn't even get to a point where Peterson is wrong or right about criticism, he just doesn't seem to criticize the right thing.

1. - What on earth, how are you interpreting what happened with Lindsay Shepherd that way?

- What happened with her is this:
1. She showed a Jordan Peterson video as a matter of discussion in class.
2. She was reprimanded by administration, citing article C-16 saying she was breaking the law and creating a dangerous environment (for poor students who aren't allowed to think for themselves) Link to secret recording
3. This is exactly what Jordan Peterson warned everyone about, how C-16 would be abused to stop discourse and free speech.
4. The university apologized for their actions and stated it never should have happened.
5. The people involved put out public statements apologizing.

"It’s a sad day when the president and a professor of a university are forced to throw themselves at the feet of those who have made other students feel unsafe in a classroom."

The way you have twisted this and interpreted the situation completely incorrectly is unbelievable, please educate yourself on this a bit more.

11. - Skipping to this because I don't think you understand the significance of C-16, especially with your bad interpretation of the Lindsay Shepherd affair. C-16 is dangerous, it starts in Canada but could spread to the world if people don't take notice. I really wish you could see how Lindsey was censored, accused of breaking the law under C-16. How does this effect free speech and dialogue in University? Teachers being afraid to teach.

-----
And finally in regards to post modernism, you have your opinion on the matter and that is fine. But there are many academics that support post modern relativism. Also you have to understand that we're not in a University lecture theater right now, we're on an internet forum. You have to frame things and provide easily understandable references, for this purpose I will just provide a link to the postmodernism article in the encyclopedia britannica:https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy

"Postmodernism and Relativism: As indicated in the preceding section, many of the characteristic doctrines of postmodernism constitute or imply some form of metaphysical, epistemological, or ethical relativism. (It should be noted, however, that some postmodernists vehemently reject the relativist label.)"

"In the 1980s and ’90s, academic advocates on behalf of various ethnic, cultural, racial, and religious groups embraced postmodern critiques of contemporary Western society, and postmodernism became the unofficial philosophy of the new movement of “identity politics.”

-----
My small conclusion: You are critical of his methods and philosophy, that is a fact. But you do not show any understanding of what he is fighting against. You don't understand the effect on society post modern neo-marxism is having, you don't understand the implications of article C-16, you don't see the censorship from free speech and thought in university. This is what I am more worried about. You're like the kind of person who critiques the origin of ingredients and the way they were harvested rather than the cake that the chef is making.

The Lindsay Shepherd situation shows exactly what I talked about - the academia having a negative attitude towards Peterson. I didn't say they were right to reprimand her, in fact I think they messed up, and the whole recording is administrators trying to bring up shitty rationalizations to her. Notice how nobody in that video, not even her, is agreeing with Peterson. I sincerely hope it was their understanding of the law (which doesn't prohibit her showing the clip as far as I understand) that made them apologize and shut up, and rightly so. It could have been the intimidation of the mob factor, which is absolutely real, but that doesn't mean I defend them.

I'm still not seeing any lawyers say that Shepherd had no right to do what she did based on C-16. What evidence do you have that C-16 disallowed it? Is it the politicians or administrators who sound dumb to you? Did you look at the document written by the law association I linked?

That's the thing, I never argued that there are no issues with academic freedom, certainly not that individual administrators don't make mistakes. If someone wants to engage them in a careful way, go ahead.

Instead we have people like Peterson running around, rallying clueless people online, making anyone from the right wing with a passing interest in this, to literal nazis happy that he's providing his crazy conspiracies to discredit the universities. You could see that as a fight against issues like the one in the video, yet you also have to think about the polarization. It discredits the whole argument that universities have free speech issues. To the academics, it makes it look like the prominent people disagreeing with them are loons!

What is it about this situation that is attractive to you? Why not look for someone who bothers to criticize the issues carefully, and doesn't undermine your cause? I don't see why you cling to this, and excuse his mistakes. I definitely don't understand why you keep referencing postmodernism the way you do when I have given you evidence that it isn't what you thought it was.

Is it the encyclopedia? I personally don't think that this is a proper source, similarly to how I wouldn't learn about math by reading definitions on a dictionary. Note how even in the article it says that they deny the relativism! You could make the case that people have used postmodernism to criticize capitalists or feminists have criticized the patriarchy, yet a more careful reading of postmodernism (consider reading the SEP article on it that I linked!) would tell you that that is a weapon you could turn against them. So why not do that instead of supporting bad, lazy interpretations of it. Or just note that do you not need postmodernism to criticize free speech issues at all, if you don't fancy reading about it.

Let me make a cake analogy too. If you really like cakes with a lot of sugar in a certain shape with certain ingredients, I commend you supporting people who make those kinds of cakes. If you start supporting one of them so much that you're happy to ignore them inserting literal shit into the cake, making you sick and discrediting the types of cakes that you like, then I will start wondering if you're a bit dogmatic and if you're not undermining your own cause.

I'm not going to talk about C-16 but do want to mention some history of higher education in both Canada and the US as it relates to the Lindsey Shepherd thing.

Early on, higher education in North America used to be principally for training future religious leaders. The institutions were run by clergy, ministers, priests, etc., to train the next generation of clergy, ministers, priests, etc.. Anyhow, the institutions were entirely run by these religious folks. Eventually that changed to include various fields of study, not just religious studies, but the fact remained that the "faculty" ran the institutions. They did everything -- the administration, book keeping, teaching, research, etc.. This was true up until I think the early part of the 20th century and then things started to change due to the proliferation of research universities (like the University of Toronto). At that point, non-faculty staff started to take over administrative responsibilities.

Flash forward to today: now there's a separation of power where there's large, non-faculty administrative structures at institutions like the University of Toronto. This development has not been met well by faculty who feel control over the institution has been lost to bureaucrats. There's many, many books and articles on this topic -- like Ginsberg's The Fall of Faculty, Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, Hacker and Dreifus's Higher Education? -- where faculty opine about how their institutions are run poorly, how academic freedom and standards are being undermined, and so forth. I think the majority opinion of faculty is along those lines (distaste for the bureaucrats and administrative structures at large institutions).

Up to the 1960s/1970s, a practice called in loco parentis ("in place of the parent") dominated many institutions. Basically, institution administrators would run campuses like parents of a household. Students had curfews, were sent to the dean or president's office for personal punishment, etc.. There was a student reaction to this in the 60s/70s and eventually the institutions became more hands off, basically ceding more personal freedoms to students in exchange for them to be more responsible for their own behavior.

Now that tide has reversed in both Canada and the US where large institutions are, once again, becoming parental figures in the lives of students. This is where the whole "safe spaces", "trigger warnings", etc., stuff comes from. This new movement is driven by three forces: 1) the large expanse of administrative structures (due in part to rapid budget growth from the 1980s through today), 2) the shift of higher education finance from primarily public funding to private funding, and 3) a certain breed of "research" coming out of student affairs academic circles that draws on postmodernist theories (e.g., group "identity" defines people more than their individual identity).

Regarding #2 above, I think this may be the most significant force. Since students are paying more (in proportion and absolute numbers) for their college education, the institutional authority has shifted also towards catering more to the students. This has meant that institutions have become more focused on amenities, student counseling services, etc.. Many large institutions have a "resort-like" quality (that's a term Hacker & Dreifus use in their book).

My impression of the Shepherd thing was along those lines. The relation to Jordan Peterson was somewhat irrelevant, in my view, to what happened to Shepherd. It was rather a situation where bureaucrats (although I think there was a faculty member on the panel) were inserting themselves into the classroom and how classes/materials should be taught.

Regarding postmodernism, it doesn't really matter what the orthodoxy is. However Lyotard first described it, or others have "properly" elaborated on it, does not really matter. It is how postmodernism has influenced to practical effect what is happening not just on campuses, but to movements like 3rd wave feminism, the black lives matters movement, etc.. They're being done a grave disservice because the underlying precepts are ones that are not suited for actual reality and will never pass muster in matters of empirical policy debate. These ways of thinking are confusing the hell out of people. There are so many concrete examples of the derangement this causes in people. Whatever you think of the whole situation at Evergreen State College, for example, it is hard to deny that those students were certainly not being discriminated against by their institution and yet they essentially paralyzed the institution with irrational, mob-like behavior for weeks. It takes significant mental gymnastics to see what happened at ESC in any other light.

I'm curious how much of this you mean as disagreement with my posts in this thread and others and how much you mean just as interesting stuff on related issues. That's because I seem to agree with most of the things you said here, and the things I disagree with, or suspect that I'd disagree with on further elaboration, are ones where we could possibly agree on the way forward.

I absolutely agree that universities don't need these overbearing, expensive structures on top of them that coddle students. I don't think I'm as well read on them as you seem to be, but with my current view I'd be more in favor of cheaper, more education focused country-funded universities that are more about giving the best education possible to the most students possible because education in and of itself is a good, not as some institutions that provide holistic experiences to select few who can afford it. I don't want the administrations forming more and more ethics committees and looking to get nosy just so they can justify their jobs. Not much more needs to be said, we don't seem to disagree on this. I'll perhaps consider reading some of the stuff you linked if I get even more annoyed at the waste of money, or if people in my country argue for going in that direction.

I don't necessarily see you as arguing that the Shepherd example I gave doesn't show a negative opinion on Peterson, am I wrong? I agree that the real issue is with incompetent, empowered bureaucrats who in this case didn't seem to have enough power to do what they wanted, however in many cases they do. I also take it that you don't also mean to imply that because faculty don't agree with the administration structure that they also don't agree with the administration's opinion on Peterson. Most of the stuff I've seen from professors seems to be against Peterson, especially when it comes to the softer sciences and humanities. Not saying you disagreed with this, just in this context it might seem like you were implying disagreement so I'm looking for clarity here.

I don't know how much I agree on 3) having THAT much to do with Postmodernism or causing these opinions, especially as there are more influential, older schools of thought focusing on people as groups, but this doesn't seem central and I'll comment on this more later.

Now, I don't really see the whole SJW hysteria thing as that serious compared to the waste of money. I certainly don't see it as anywhere close to the biggest political issue NA or Europe have. I know conservatives can get real triggered upon hearing of safe spaces and trigger warnings, but several rooms in universities for comforting either coddled or actually traumatized students don't seem to be a real threat to free speech, nor do trigger warnings destroy any academic freedom. If they are being undermined, it is through other means, not these. I think it has been an incredible rhetorical victory for the right, especially far right to paint these issues as focal points in political consensus, railing against these while gladly ignoring the many, many, many times more significant issues that the Trump campaign brings. As good whataboutism as Russia ever had. I'm also endlessly annoyed by the hypocritical "leftwing" folk who seem to enjoy feeding huge rightwing audiences for bashing PC culture / Postmodernism straw-men / idiot feminists on Tumblr as well as immigration / Islam as their first political priority. I don't think I have to agree with feminists or be receiving that sweet (((Shillary money))) to think this, either. It's just having reasonable priorities.

With that said, I wouldn't be surprised if you disagreed with me on this, but I'm not sure that really matters for the purpose of this discussion. Especially as you have said that you hard-pressed for time, it's worth seeing if it's relevant here at all.

I have doubts on whether we agree on Postmodernism and how related it is to the situation at universities. For example I constantly see people blaming Postmodernism for people claiming race anti-realism, gender being different from sex, arguing against the clarity of differences among men and women. I rarely hear them reference Postmodernism for this, in fact, they often bring up statistical minutiae, problems with defining these, arguments about how you can group genes or specific features. I hear Postmodernism much more often from their opponents, who rarely acknowledge or argue against these... often simple, although usually not intuitively appealing arguments. I've heard the same arguments (that people blame postmodernism for) from educated people who really dislike Postmodernism! Like that chap I linked in the thread, Gary Edwards. This seems to present an easy course of action. We might disagree on Postmodernism, but we probably both agree that you should bite the bullet on what you say. If they are making policy arguments or arguments about science or statistics, it's good to engage them on exactly that. If they are talking about Postmodernism, and you seem to say that they perverted it or drew inspiration from it, well then why not show them that their own inspiration can be set against them, or that they don't understand it in the first place.

That would make great headway in showing to them that there can be disagreement from people who properly engage them, don't just psychologize them, compare them to protesting lobsters, flirt with the alt-right or just make up conspiracies about what Postmodernism or the law says. Because that's how they feel about Peterson, who has only served to polarize this issue. If they are famously reluctant to even talk with people who disagree with them, well what are you doing to that when you embrace people who just peach to the choir and try to straw-man them into something out of a cartoon. It's like that cake analogy that I gave above.

I don't necessarily see you as arguing that the Shepherd example I gave doesn't show a negative opinion on Peterson, am I wrong?

Yes and no. Anything seems to be fair game in this movement to sterilize education and insulate students from "problematic" topics or even individuals (like Peterson). There are universities which have stopped allowing classics like Plato, Shakespeare, Twain, and dozens of others to be taught in their classes. This falls under the same umbrella of a hyper-sensitivity to group identities. Plato is a "microaggression" against a student from a non-western heritage. You might think I'm joking, but I assure you I am not. The claim is that these western classics are staples of the white, colonialist/imperialist, patriarchy. They are not "inclusive" of other ideas and backgrounds.

We've had some pretty surreal events happen at my institution. I've seen it first hand and it makes me alarmed. They hired a new president fairly recently and that whole episode was mind boggling. We had students shouting down people. They had security guards patrolling my building in case some student lost it. Etc.

I said this before, but Jordan Peterson is not blazing a new path with regards to his views on postmodernism. There's been decades of people, right and left, being very critical of postmodernism's influence in academia. Again, research stuff about the so-called "Sokal Affair", or read Allan Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind. Bill Maher, a leftist-comedian, just recently talked about exactly this issue on the season premier of his show. Camille Paglia, far leftist, has interviews going back into the 90s about her views on postmodernism. Noam Chomsky, who is just about as far left as it gets, is very critical of postmodernism's influence in academia.

University used to be a place where you were confronted with new ideas that challenged you, to make you think even about the most terrible things like war, genocide, murder, and other tragedies of the human condition. But it is now being converted into a daycare. Children from high schools arrive and they leave as children because they're being insulated from all ideas that could challenge what they think about the world and themselves.

Steven Pinker, also a leftist, recently said as much. Students are unaware of simple, well-known facts because they're being shielded from them by those who think this is the correct direction. Whether or not Jordan Peterson is right about C-16 is irrelevant. Students should be able to deal with what Jordan Peterson is saying. Insulating them from that is wrong. What will happen to them when they go out into the "real world" and realize not everyone has their best interests in mind?

If you're going to insist that the Shepherd thing reflects some fact about Peterson, about how he's rejected by academia, then you're grouping him together with some pretty illustrious company: Plato, Shakespeare, Twain, etc.

The claim is that these western classics are staples of the white, colonialist/imperialist, patriarchy.

First of all, they might say something similar, but I don't think they'd say exactly that. If they are, there's no need for talking about Postmodernism or lobsters, you can just point out that the person is an idiot for thinking that Plato or Shakespeare are staples of white patriarchy when they didn't have the concept of whiteness. Same for many such accusations. I'd be careful about getting your info critics who are also ranting about Postmodernism and saying "they believe in nothing" or arguing that everything is relativism, and instead get it directly from those making the claim, looking for the most authoritative and wide-reaching examples possible. If they do say Plato is an example of whiteness, they better have a good explanation for it.

In many cases, they will be right. Plato did argue for slavery. Many of the greats did say a lot of bigoted, awful shit. For all I know, Twain did implicitly support some form of racism while spiritedly arguing against it otherwise; I haven't read him since my childhood years. I wouldn't necessarily agree that they are inclusive. A philosophy degree in the west often involves zero eastern philosophy. Since it isn't a western philosophy degree, why not include some.

Doesn't mean you have to support their methods of dealing with it. Slavery is perfectly worth arguing against, so is sexism, of which there is plenty in old philosophy. If they start saying that you should throw out Plato, well... I don't see how you need Peterson for that. If they actually undermine academic freedom, then argue against that undermining explicitly!

The same academics will, after all, be your best friends in that conversation. Here is an example poll of what is mostly philosophy professors and grad students rating the most influential western philosophers. Does it look like they're ready to throw out controversial philosophers? They have Heidegger in the top40! A full blown nazi who, roughly speaking, stayed a nazi after WW2! The list is full of what we would consider bigots nowadays. Throwing out Plato left and right isn't possible, it's not happening. So it doesn't seem at all like there's any need for Peterson, especially considering the impact he has had on soft sciences / humanities (that being discrediting the cause against radical feminism) and his views on the universities. There's no need for people who flirt with the alt-right, there's no need for psychologizing, there's no need for talking about postmodernism unless it's brought up by the radicals themselves, no need for private universities who don't have all these pesky academic freedom issues, instead just rejecting courses involving social justice, period (lol). The professors will do fine protecting the courses themselves, and if they don't, well then we can support people who know what they're talking about.

I mentioned Sokal in my other reply to you - from my understanding it wasn't really about postmodernism allowing shit to be published.

I'm aware that the postmodernism scare isn't new. It's very much the same thing (in terms of the scare) as cultural marxism in my mind, and that started with the nazis. I personally see much more value in either engaging postmodernism properly, or having the professors defending their own academic freedom by talking policy. I won't argue about the specific people's interpretation of postmodernism, unless you want to bother with that, but I don't personally think that they've done a good job of engaging postmodernism from what I've seen. Some of them seem to be happy to create content for right-wingers at the expense of their left leaning views, and that's sort of what I see with postmodernism. Perhaps for fame, I don't know. It's that that I sense more in their critique of postmodernism more so than a honest take on the issues. Not because they disagree with it, but because they (a) don't do a good job of understanding it and most importantly (b) make it out to be an absurdly huge issue, going at it as if it was more important than Trump winning the white house is to them as leftists. I haven't read them extensively though, perhaps Paglia or Pinker could surprise me, just that what I've seen of them didn't seem good at it. Chomsky didn't seem bothered to look into it too much from what I saw, and I don't see why he should. He's actually far left, and he's probably happy to just tell them to shut up and focus on real issues (=economics), and that's fair, as long as he doesn't start ranting about it more than he talks about climate change or republicans or trump. And being a careful lifelong political activist, he would never do that.

Anyway, doesn't matter, it's okay that they dislike postmodernism as long as it doesn't overshadow the real issues and it doesn't become a scapegoat. Which people like Peterson are certainly doing. Paglia seemed to support him in that in her talk with him, and that left a really bad taste in my mouth. Maher seemed to love Milo as well, as far as I recall. It's hard for me to see why I'd consider them reputable after that.

As we mostly agree on what the real issues are, these debates are sort of moot.

While I do not think that citing Peterson should be forbidden in campuses, nor do I think that Plato is similarly rejected, I think your analogy of putting him next to good company there is absurd. I could just as well put Breivik there using the same criteria.

You are so dense, he said that the ramifications of C-16 brought about behaviours in the Lindsay Shepherd affair, which was also predicted by Jordan Peterson. You're right they don't talk about Peterson and she doesn't defend him, and _that is the point_ his video was used as a reference for discussion objectively.

They would not have called her in under the pretence that it was all about Jordan Peterson, they did it under the guise and power they thought they had been granted by C-16.

Also there are lawyers in the hearing of C-16 verbally destroying C-16, did you not see that?

Also there are lawyers in the hearing of C-16 verbally destroying C-16, did you not see that?

I prefer being a responsible citizen (not of Canada, but this holds true for everything...) and just siding with expert consensus as I understand it. I linked a statement from an association from thousands of lawyers and professors that gives me that consensus. If I tried to, as a layman, interpret the law too hard and side with whatever side convinces me on political hearings, I might think climate change don't real and smoking don't hurt ya. I do, of course, think about these issues for fun every now and again, but I have considerable humility about my ability to think about it more informedly than thousands of lawyers.

The fact that you keep telling me that I'm dense and to open my eyes when giving such meager evidence makes me think that most people of your opinion are not informed. With that said, suppose I am dense, why are you even talking to me then? Looking to score points with your friends who already agree with you?

i didn't generalize. nazis valued being good citizens and valued expertise. i wasn't trying to be intellectual. i didn't jump to any far fetched and utterly opinion, nor did i express an opinion. i stated an objective observation of historical record. i don't know how many people had no choice in world war 2, nor did i say anything about whether anybody had any choices in world war 2.

the irony here is that you deny my objective observation of historical record by calling it generalizing on the highest level, and then you craft an either/or scenario in which the only choices nazis had were 'geting fucking shot in the head, or deported into camps'. what about the nazi holding the gun to the heads, did he have another choice? your black & white thinking and expression indicates your lacking capacity for coherent expression.

also, it's a funny irony that the guy telling me to have manners is proclaiming 'jesus christ' and 'fucking' while he calls me ignorant and mocks the intellectual level of my contribution to the thread.

I think he's questioning either the relevance or the conclusions you're attempting to draw from that observation. The implication you appear to be making is that being a "good citizen" and "bowing to expert consensus" makes you a Nazi. Or perhaps maybe you mean that the "herd mentality", which led to people following in line with the Nazi party platform, also means being a good citizen and bowing to experts.

However, that misses a whole lot of important historical context that played a role in Hitler's rise to power. If the counterfactual were true (for instance, Germany never fought in WW1 and Germany's economy was the same it was as before), and you assumed the same "herd mentality", I doubt Nazism would've been a significant thing.

Beyond that, no one can be an expert on all things. We need to rely on our judgment of who is a credible "expert" on things which we ourselves are not experts of. I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but I've read enough of the various accounts/evidence of the speciation in the animal kingdom to know that I buy the evolutionary explanation over the creationist explanation.

EDIT: I would also not count on myself to diagnose health issues since I am not a medical doctor. And medical doctors do (hopefully) based on the current expert consensus for diagnoses, treatments, etc..

i didn't imply anything, nor did i attempt to draw any conclusions from the observation. whatever you get from it beyond the objective observation of historical record is facilitated by your imagination.

it wasn't irrelevant. it was a rhetorical point drawing a parallel between the appeal to authority in son1dow's arguments and the very commonly derided nazi ideological reverence for authority. what you get from that is up to you, but there it is, perfectly relevant to the thread. if you want to play the "i'm going to say something snide without giving you the good faith benefit of bothering to attempt to understand your position" game, that's fine. it's to your detriment, not mine.

What I get from your rhetorical point is that "appeal to authority" is somehow less valid (or invalid) because that's what the Nazis did. That's a warped way to gauge whether son1dow's argument is valid or not.

I think it'd be detrimental to take your rhetorical point seriously because then how do you defend any of your beliefs for which you do not have expert knowledge of? How do you decide what is healthy to eat or not? How do you know if it's helpful to practice good hygiene? If you take any medicine, why would you trust it not to poison/kill you?

Without some level of trust for expert knowledge, there is no human civilization. We would have no division of labor because we would all try to be experts of everything ourselves instead of relying on others to do so. No farmers, no doctors, no mechanics, no engineers, no teachers, no lawyers, etc.. Civilization has advanced to where it is because we've, to a certain degree, cooperated with each other. In good faith, this is for the betterment of everyone.

what you get from "[my] rhetorical point" and what i said are two different things. you think it's detrimental to take "my point" seriously, because of some thing you're imagining that you're now calling "my point" (that isn't my point).

you've asked some questions about how it's possible to determine the viability of executing particular behaviors without the presence of authoritative knowledge. these questions are irrelevant to what i have said so far, and i don't feel compelled to answer them. i will say that they're questions with very easy and obvious answers, which i'm sure if you spend a few seconds considering in good faith you'll arrive at.

regarding what you said about "without some level of trust for expert knowledge, etc.", i haven't said anything about whether or not people should trust expert knowledge. you're literally replying to your imagination here, and despite your posturing, it's mindless and rude for you to continue to so misconstrue what i said without even bothering to ask "what did you mean?", and to conflate your delusions of my intent with my actual actions.

it isn't hard to imagine a more substance-less post than that. that's just something you're saying. i've said what i mean and i've been very clear. i don't know why you've taken such a combative and rude stance. i posted a observational humorous parallel between son1dow and nazis, and now you're talking to me as if i'm your stepson and we're in some kind of argument. you're not, and we aren't. deal with it. *puts on deal with it glasses*

It's hard to imagine a more substance-less post than this.Say what you mean or just quit posting.Right. So, it was irrelevant. Congratulations, irrelevancy.Not being combative. Where do you get that from? Sorry if you feel that way. You don't need to be defensive.

So you haven't heard what the lawyers said in the hearing. You really need to start telling the truth. It would only take a few minutes of your time, but you would only do that if you actually wanted to learn the truth. Bloody hypocrite.

I have not said whether I have heard them. I have heard some of them, heard more back in the day when it happened rather than recently when it was linked in this thread, and I have forgotten some of their claims.

I have, however, given a reason for why that doesn't really matter. Do you find that reason unconvincing? Why?

Well on one hand I have an encyclopedia edited by an established Philosophical author, which agrees with Petersons view of post modernism. Then on the other hand I have you, author of many words on this forum. I think ill go with encyclopedia Brittanica to be honest.

(And don't for one minute think this is all I've read on post modernism. Like I said, it was a good reference for this discussion)

PS, you still don't understand the implications of C16 and the Lindsay Shepherd affair.

Well on one hand I have an encyclopedia edited by an established Philosophical author, which agrees with Petersons view of post modernism. Then on the other hand I have you, author of many words on this forum. I think ill go with encyclopedia Brittanica to be honest.

I take it you have lost your ability to read before reading the post your are responding to, and lost your memory of the journal and links within it that you read prior, then. Fine. Good luck bluffing your way in other discussions. Wait, there's something more in your post...

PS, you still don't understand the implications of C16 and the Lindsay Shepherd affair.

???
Back in the day they were calling faggots shitting on canvas and calling it art bolshevics because that's what was happening back then.
Nowadays people are calling these faggots marxists which is pretty much the same shit.
Nothing changed.
People still shit on canvas.
Where is the conspiracy? :@

The only problem with the term is that it implies a conscious plan and a concerted effort of mostly 'jewish marxists' to undermine the 'western' world - and this was how it was used by nazis and is to a degree used by nazis today to criticize left-wing thought.

That being said, everyone knows what is meant by it, and which schools of thought, so as a descriptive term it works.

It is just as justified to call the 'Alt-Right' cultural fascists btw.

I don't know of any feminist thinker who associates with the term 'patriarchy' a current of thought in the social sciences; I only know of feminists who use this term to describe a social structure (whether it exists is debatable), which is based on male dominancy.

EDIT:
A lot of the stuff, that is said by people who are arguing against 'Cultural Marxism' is wrong, because in many points you can't mix the 'Frankfurt School' with the proponents of 'Postmodernism';
however you can take a perspective, where you identify things that they DO have in common and argue against those two currents and then you call them Cultural Marxism. It is then a result of your political view. I like the authors, who people are ascribing to Cultural Marxism; but I can see the point the Cult.Marx.-bashers are making; they don't like the political views, who may result from reading them.

2nd EDIT:

they give a unifying narrative to the world.

I don't like that narrative. So I call it Cultural Marxism and say I'm against that because of this or that reason. Whether I call it Cultural Marxism, Soft Marxism, Marxism, Relativism, doesn't matter it's only the name for the unifying narrative that I am against...

3nd EDIT:

So speaking in postmodern terms: I am saying the signifier(Cultural Marxism) doesn't matter, because it is contingent, if I change it (to Relativism, or Soft Marxism) the signified (the unifying narrative) will still be there.
However, you, as the postmodernist, that you are ;-) might think: maybe the signifier is more important than the signified and without the signifier the signified disappears?
:-)

Well, that explains our rift then, I don't think hard science representatives talking outside of their research sphere have more authority than soft science representatives or philosophers talking within their specific research spere. It seems entirely out of touch with the nature of their work to say so.

I can't really comment all too much because I've not even looked at much of the things he's been talking about, I've read a few things here and there but I'll do a little more watching of some of his videos before making a judgement.

The great thing and somewhat arrogant thing about philosophy is that the academic intellectuals are pretty much sipping from the same cup when it comes to further progressing any philosophical thoughts, with the notion of;

"We've paid for and have studied the great thinkers of our times so our word matters more than the ones who have consumed a plethora of other thinkers without any financial tuition."

Philosophy in my opinion has become somewhat politically incorrect, there hasn't been many who have stood out and challenged anything of recent, so it's good to see he has a bit of brass on him to go out look at things from a different perspective.

Was not surprised to see you as the author of this post- anyway I don't enjoy following E-celebrities, because it necessarily creates a fanbase and personality around the author. If I buy a book, then there is no emotional personality associated with the author, and I can be assured that there isn't an incentive for the author to manipulate me into donating to his patreon or whatever.

So, maybe I don't agree with the point about cultural Marxism, although I personally don't use the term because I don't think that using buzz words is a good thing, but it is just used to identify a "side" in the "information wars" so I don't think that it is baseless. Also the Nazi's using a similar theory is a clear association fallacy, anyway I did not read any of the books by the people in the conspiracy theory so I can't say if that is valid or not, but as a loose term it is OK. I also don't agree with you about the anti-intellectualisim, but I am too busy to write a more detailed post then this one.

Anyway since you don't like the guy, this is an interesting video that you will probably like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iFi4p4QC44 Which talks about how much money he is making off of his new job, how his fans perceive him.

Was not surprised to see you as the author of this post- anyway I don't enjoy following E-celebrities, because it necessarily creates a fanbase and personality around the author. If I buy a book, then there is no emotional personality associated with the author, and I can be assured that there isn't an incentive for the author to manipulate me into donating to his patreon or whatever.

I absolutely agree with this. Getting your self-help/psychology advice + philosophy + politics from one guy is a bad recipe.

I think nearly any of the already extant terms would fit better, and not carry any of the connotations that Peterson is obviously inserting into it. He's not using it as a simple descriptor at all the way I see it.

The guy you linked is pretty great at delivering comedy. I thought the depiction of the sort of fan who is pseudocultist, "he is the greatest thinker of our time", "I have not read more than 10 nonfiction books or know what his research is in but it's absolutely true", "I would go to his church", "here's a picture of him as a prophet" was pretty good. And they do exist in incredible numbers.

Have you listened to his tumblrisms bits? I think it's him, although it probably wasn't on this channel. It was pretty funny. Punching down and all, but hilarious.

Yeah it is him and yeah I was listening to the guy since 2014 as those videos were coming out, really nice stuff.

I think that the issue is beyond it being one guy, I think that it is the entire medium itself that is bad. It offers commentary that is a small intellectual "step-up" from the TV and the radio, but ultimately suffers from the same problems, as well as problems of its own, so it's not good to watch either.

Now, I won't comment on his specific style because I never bothered watching him, but that is why I have stayed away from "alt-right" because it is primarily just E-Celebs and their followers who are regurgitating ideas and viewpoints that most likely come from books that I could just read (or maybe i've already read) onto a 3 hour live-streamed skype call. So, why should I watch Stefan Molyneux when I can just read Ayn Rand or something, which spares me the patreon requests.

Also maybe this is unrelated, but I was watching a recording of VICE on HBO and it was a surprising editing style, when I watched it I felt like I was watching the next generation of propaganda. I think that the TV is getting worse... OK, so you probably agree with the stuff that it is saying, but I hope you can see what I mean, it has a very fast editing style and I think that it is designed to give you enough time to comprehend the idea but not enough time to to examine it critically, then it moves on to the next idea, and you can no longer think about it because you are too busy listening to the next idea. And like 50% of it is not ideology, you will notice that it starts out like a news report, this is to get you invested in watching their report so you are less likely to turn it off when it begins injecting the ideology, then if they started the political part first and turned people off from it at the hook. Then in later parts it slows down a lot so that people don't get burned out on it, and also so they can fill up 20 miniutes, anyway maybe that was a weird tangent, this is the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KLY3S7BGlw